A review by twstdtink
Maggie Dove: A Mystery by Susan Breen

3.0

I liked Susan Breen's writing style. Her characters, though, were lacking for me. I didn't find a single one very likeable. Breen was so focused on making them realistically flawed, she missed out on making them lovable. Maggie Dove, the lead, is a 60-something-year-old widow who teaches Sunday School. Dove has been through some loss, and this (at least) really resonated with me. Having lost someone young to a tragic accident 8 years ago, I felt Breen really nailed the emotional journey of that. I believe Dove was supposed to come off as an every-day hero, someone who would get down to business and sleuth out the answers, even when the police failed. But Dove appeared sort of hysterical to me, a busy body who "reluctantly" got involved in drama and secretly liked it. The murderer in this book (no spoilers!) was obvious from the start. There's one glaring outlier and he/she did it. Also, the mode of death (spoiler!) was Ecstasy and I could tell the author had no genuine experience with the substance. Ecstasy is a crap murder weapon - it's expensive, it creates side-effects that would be obvious before being fatal, and it expands the pupils to cartoonish proportions (which would be a dead giveaway during autopsy).