Posted by I was thrilled to receive this advance reader copy in trade for an honest review and to support my local independent bookstore and press: Wild Lark Books. wildlarkbooks.com All thoughts and opinions in this review are my own.
My Review:
If you like cozy mysteries, you might read this book and argue with me.
Harper is deeply bothered by Shepperton and its oppressive small-town atmosphere from which she has escaped because everyone seemingly judged her, made (negative) assumptions about her and made her feel trapped. By departing the town, she developed freedom yet sort of followed in the footsteps of her father anyway, landing in the same general career subject (as her town had predicted). She wielded wicked judgment of her parents’ decisions to stay in Shepperton and the life they got “sucked into” by “complacency” despite her parents’ objective success–her father rising to a PhD and a professorship and her mother developing into a strong leader and a managing partner while both lived in West Texas.
Early on there’s a quirky nurse character who constantly manipulates people, which is sort of fun. She eavesdrops in the patient’s room and then nudges Harper’s mom to let her be the one to run to the house; she nudges Harper to go have a cup of coffee alone with the handsome gentleman and old friend, Matt.
The plot moves quickly early on, and I enjoyed the first third of the book, which drew me in to Harper’s story and that of her mom and dad in their life she’s been ignoring. Since I grew up in a small town, many of her feelings resonated with me.
We run into more of her high school friends. One is already a pharmacist (ten years after high school) and another launched her own hair salon, yet Harper judges that they’ve fallen short of her small-town-escapist goals. (Never mind she’s an underutilized gig-worker barely making ends meet.) Then, at that exact moment, she discovers her flaw in judging them–and she realizes she has fallen short of her own goals (not to mention developed bad habits of judging others). I enjoyed seeing the more humble and humane side of her.
Harper is a strong character plowing her way through this puzzle, helped by three assistants at various levels along the way until the midpoint–in fact the assistants are doing almost all the work–where all the clues lead to the title’s meaning (which seemed obvious since the front cover).
Harper seems to have almost no agency–she’s not searching for clues or hunting down details, although her many assistants carry her along. Finally, at 82% of the way through the work, a nurse confides a ton of details, not only about three suspicious deaths but also about some strange structural constructs and odd divisions of labor across the staff of her organization, some of which stretched beyond believability for me. This suddenly leads Harper to a conclusion about the ringleader whom she identifies as the main suspect. While I appreciated her ignoring obvious suspects, I never learned why she dismissed them.
No spoilers here, but the book seemed so predictable from the start through 85% of the read. I’m admittedly not a huge reader of cozy mysteries, but in my somewhat ignorant opinion this is not a cozy mystery (or a mystery at all). Mysteries, and certainly cozies, start with a dead body, but this one did not. Yes, it took place in a small town with an amateur investigator. But our investigator was a thirty-year-old freelance writer (a little young for cozy). The only thing you might call a murder (or two) became known after the midpoint (yet no one investigates these deaths so we are never completely certain any of the suspicious deaths were murders). The police refuse to get involved (until one out-of-scene interaction by a cop, the results of which we never learn), and our investigator spends almost the entire book not investigating a single clue but repeatedly falling into incredible luck having person after person simply confide in her so that she is able to advance (albeit in the wrong direction most of the time).
Many cozy mysteries are a series, which means I need to fall in love with the protagonist in book one, and for me, that didn’t happen.
Why are there so many rhetorical questions? (Six in the opening chapter.) One paragraph near the midpoint contained seven rhetorical questions in a row, and I didn’t know the answers to any of them. In speaking about thrillers, Stephen James once told me a writer may use between zero and one exclamation points. This book had at least four in chapter two and many more throughout! They also included handy reminders after a significant quote with statements like “That was a bold statement.”–just in case you missed it.
But don’t take my word for it.
You should cozy up to these people dying to donate and decide what you think.
DYING TO DONATE by Lauren Cassel Brownell
- Published by: Wild Lark Books
- Publication date: August 19, 2022
- Pages: 176
- Genres: Cozy Mystery (classified by publisher); (and from me: Thriller, possibly mystery)
- POV: First person, past
- Narrator: True and authentic, close
- Opening setting: Dinner time phone call between mother (in Shepperton, Texas) and daughter (400 miles away)
- Other significant locations: October in Shepperton, Texas; Murdoch Memorial Hospital (in Shepperton)
- Number of named, identified or described characters: 34+
Publisher’s Summary:
When Harper Fox’s father, suffering from dementia, disappears into the night, she knows she has no choice but to return to her hometown of Shepperton, Texas and help her mother make the difficult decision to admit him to a memory care facility – Castle Woods Retirement Village.
At first, Harper thinks balancing her writing career and impending deadline with caring for her elderly parents is the biggest mystery she will solve, but when residents of Castle Woods Retirement Village begin to die at an alarming rate, the mystery becomes far more complicated.
Can Harper uncover what connects these mysterious deaths in time to keep her own father from becoming the next victim?