Genre: Mystery
Mass Market Paperback; Digital Book
ISBN #: 9780425275948
Berkley Publishing
304 Pages
$7.99; $5.99 Amazon
November 1, 2016
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Tourists are pouring into the town of Broken Boot for the annual Homestead Days celebration. Opening the festivities at Two Boots dance hall is smooth-talking country singer Jeff Clark, the ex-boyfriend of Josie's best friend, Patti Perez. When the charming Clark woos Patti onstage in an attempt to rekindle some parks with his old flame, Josie fears her friend will end up as just one more notch on the singer's guitar strap.
To impress her editor at the Broken Boot Bugle, Josie and her chihuahua Lenny, pursue the singer to Patti's house, hoping for an interview. Instead, they discover Clark facedown in a bowl of guacamole with a bloodied guitar at his side. With Patti suddenly a murder suspect, Josie must use her reporter skills to find out who had a chip on their shoulder - before the killer double dips...
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When Josie's friend Patti Perez' ex-boyfriend Jeff Clark is set to play at Two Boots, Josie's uncle's dance hall, they go to see him. When Clark pulls Patti up on the stage to croon a song to her, Josie has a bad feeling. But bad goes to worse the next day when she goes to Patti's home to interview him and finds him dead in the living room.
After a cursory investigation on the part of the police, they arrest Patti and charge her with murder. But Josie knows Patti's innocent and begins an investigation on her own. While nothing really seems to speak to her, it's the bits and pieces she gleans that makes her realize that there's a killer still on the loose, and she might be the only one looking for them. Since the case seems to be all but closed, she realizes she has to act fast - with a little almost-too-late help from Lightfoot - to find the real murderer before Patti is locked away for a very long time...
I will admit that this book was better than the first, which was fair at best. But I never got the feeling that the police had any real evidence to convict Patti of murder. Yes, the guitar had her prints on it - it was her guitar, so why wouldn't it? Just because she had an argument with him does not a murder make - and others had arguments with Clark the same night. That was all they had: a guitar with fingerprints of the person who owned it. Now, what seems strangest about this is that the killer's prints weren't on the guitar. Did the murderer (whom I won't name here) bring gloves to Patti's house? Because otherwise the killer's prints would also be on the guitar; and if they wiped it clean, then Patti's prints wouldn't have been there at all. So are we supposed to believe that the true killer has no fingerprints? This was never explained, but it's the type of thing that I think about. It never made sense to me, and I don't see how it could be accepted without explaining why the killer's prints weren't on the guitar as well.
Aside from that BIG thing, there's the fact of Josie herself. She's pretty blah. She has no personality to speak of, and I can't understand why either man would be interested in her. She's nosy, of course, but doesn't have anything in the way of personality to set her apart. She's trying to set up the would-be love interests (which is fine since I don't really care for either one - they're both very blah also without any real traits to help carry the series; they're just dull); she's not funny, doesn't come off as particularly smart (just nosy), and seems so desperate to be a newspaper reporter again that I wonder why she's even working at the restaurant - when she does, which isn't often. In fact, she's so less-than-smart that she couldn't figure out the murderer until she saw their face. Any of the readers of this book would have figured it out before her. She really needs to find another line of work.
While I'm not a fan of this particular series, I will read the third book to see if there's an improvement; hopefully, the clues to the murder in the next book will get better, and both men will have found other love interests as well and maybe the author will actually introduce a man who might have some kind of personality to the mix.
https://www.amazon.com/Good-Guacamole-Taste-Texas-Mystery/dp/0425275949/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2381949019
More on Rebecca Adler's Books: https://www.fantasticfiction.com/a/rebecca-adler/
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