By Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer.
The start of this new series has A Story. After years of writer's block, Jenny Crusie re-partnered up with her old writing partner, Bob Mayer, and together they've created a terrific start to this series. I read Jenny's blog and I've been chomping at the bit for this one for years, and now that they're self-publishing the first three books, I'll actually get them pretty soon. Huzzah! I read their original three partnered novels and while I enjoyed them, their two styles of snarky lady partners with military dude took awhile to mesh. (Annoyingly, my blog search can't seem to find the reviews for these.) I am happy to note that this book really managers to mesh those two styles together, and I liked Vince, who's tough but in his own way tender, as a match for Liz. This romance is quick and it works.
Liz Danger is a ghostwriter from Burney, Ohio, a place where she had A Bad Reputation as a teenager: both for being romantically involved with Cash Porter, a dude who dumped her three times, and for (supposedly) changing George Pens's campaign posters to "Penis." I note George lost the election, is now police chief, and is still not happy about this one, especially since the current mayor is an asshole. Liz's mom was a single parent and eventually got treatment for her alcoholism, but growing up in Burney was not a fun time for Liz, and she booked the hell out of there once she was legal.
After her mean/crazy aunt ML sends her a nasty note about her mother, Liz sucks it up and briefly goes to visit her mother for her birthday, bringing a large red teddy bear out of guilt (Liz's mom MaryBeth collects way too many bears). Unfortunately, having a little car incident traps Liz in town longer than she planned on, JUST in time for Cash's wedding to high-class rich girl Lavender Blue. The Blues are the rich family in town (and Liz is related to them, albeit more than she knows), and it 's a cold-as-ice political marriage for sure. Cash keeps coming onto Liz and Liz is not remotely interested. Meanwhile, the bride actually kind of takes an odd liking to Liz, who is honest and also not trying to get anything out of Lavender, and when the maid of honor bails and nobody else in the family will do, Lavender asks Liz to step in. Does this make sense to you? Not really to me either, but Liz goes for it after her current boss wants her to, and thus she's around for all kinds of wedding drama. The bride gives an infamous wedding speech, gets locked up by guards, trades dresses with Liz to sneak out and meet up wit her ex-fiance, and then someone goes after the family pearls and Lavender's dead.
In addition to all of that, Liz rescues a dachshund (based on Jenny Crusie's dog) and starts to work at rescuing young Peri Blue, whose mom is clearly having alcohol issues since the death of her husband Navy. (Punny names ahoy!) Liz is also trying to get her butt over to her current employer, Anemone Patterson, who is a hoot. Anemone becomes so addicted to hearing about the small town drama that she decides to move there and see it all for herself. And when Liz finds out why her aunt's been such a jerk for so many years, things get even rockier.
Thank goodness for Vince Cooper, a former Army Ranger who took a job as a cop in Burney for the quiet. While Vince is quietly dealing with his own issues regarding a dying former teammate and possibly coming down with the same health issues that are killing his Ranger friends, he's an excellent support to Liz and a smart investigator to boot. Vince and Liz become hot and heavy pretty much instantly, but it works. He's also quietly been investigating the suspicious suicidal(?) death of Navy Blue, especially whatever financial chicanery was going on at the time.
I enjoyed the heck out of reading this, it was a lot of fun and I enjoyed the characters. Liz and Vince work as a couple, the supporting nice characters are great, the overall mystery works. I have already pre-ordered the next two books in the first trilogy. I've missed Jenny's books and I'm happy she has a new one out, and this re-partnership with Bob Mayer is really going well and they mesh even better. I look forward to more Burney drama!
I only have a few quibbles to mention.
(a) I do want to note, in a vaguely spoilerish way, that both the mayoral drama (same major being in the job for 15 years) and the kind of murder that goes on here reminded me of Welcome to Temptation, a comment I'll elaborate on in the spoiler space. Couldn't help but notice that.
(b) I'm kind of confused as to how if (a) Burney is SUCH a small town where all the rumors go around, and (b) Liz is related to the Blues--at the start of the book we're told that Aunt ML (MaryLou Blue...har har) is married to a Blue and Liz is close to her cousin Molly--how the heck is Liz not very (?) acquainted with Navy, Skye, Lavender, and the rest of that family? (Note: she apparently knew Navy and thought he was a jerk, doesn't sound like she knew the sisters at all?) It sounds like all of those people were presumably around on some level before she left town, or at least aren't younger than 15. It seemed really weird that Liz didn't know the Blues that weren't Molly/Dayton/ML, and made it even weirder that Lavender essentially asked a total stranger (and ex of her fiance, though it's such a loveless engagement for political reasons that Lavender doesn't even seem to care that her sister's probably slept with him too) to be in her wedding. That's a level of off-ness in logic that's hard to make work, and it's a credit to the authors that it almost does, but it's still pretty weird that Liz, who's been gone for years and hasn't had any involvement in this drama, gets pulled in with more or less strangers, even if they are relatives.
(note: upon asking online, some people said that Lavender and Skye were probably under the age of 10 when Liz left. I wasn't clear on that.)
But this gets four stars from me, because even though I thought that whole situation was kinda weird, I had a great time reading it. More, please.
Spoiler space
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Re: the murder: like WTT, the main plot murder is more of a passive murder than an active one.
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