Dead as a Door KnockerRating: ★★
isbn: 9781250197429
Series: House-Flipper Mystery #1
Publication Date: February 11, 2019
Pages: 368
Genre: Mystery
Publisher: St. Martin's Paperbacks
Whitney Whitaker dreams of running her own real estate company instead of managing properties part-time for a small agency. So when one of her more difficult clients decides to liquidate a property, Whitney seizes the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to score the distressed house for a song. But when her cat Sawdust digs up a corpse in the flower bed, all bets are off.
When the investigation - led by Nashville Police Detective Collin Flynn - starts moving slower than molasses, Whitney figures an important clue must be missing. So she launches an investigation of her own before the mortgage property forecloses on the property and Whitney loses her investment. But who was composting in the garden? Who would want that person dead? And is Whitney their next victim?
Diane Kelly writes a very good series about an IRS agent, Tara Holloway, and a surprisingly decent series about a police officer and her K-9 (surprising because the dog has its own chapters).
This is not on par with those other efforts. This was just short of awful.
The characters are good, but the author has fully grown adults running around saying “the b word” but not thinking twice about haring off to the home of someone they decide must be a suspect and “interrogating” them, flinging accusations around like confetti.
The plot was well constructed but just about smothered under chapters of introspection and a detective just short of being earnestly incompetent.
Sawdust is awesome, but Kelly tends to give him slightly canine tendencies that don’t quite ring true, and frankly, no matter how endearing Sawdust is, a reader can’t help but wonder if this isn’t a marketing gimmick to appease the cat lovers out there.
Disappointing, but this won’t be a series I’ll be continuing.