Genre: Mystery
Hardcover; Digital Book
ISBN #: 9781643850009
Crooked Lane Books
$26.99; $12.99 Amazon
August 13, 2019
⭐⭐
Little person author Zoe Zola believes that one of the unluckiest things in life is to receive an invitation - in the form of a letter edged in black - to an Agatha Christie symposium at an old Upper Peninsula hunting lodge. Her reluctance dissipates when she learns that the organizer is named Emily Brent - the name of a character poisoned by cyanide in Christie's And Then There Were None.
As a dreary rain soaks the U.P., Zoe and nine other Christie scholars - each of whom bears a vague resemblance to one of the mystery novel's characters - arrive at the lodge. At the opening night dinner, arguments flare over the experts' discordant theories about Christie. Next morning, the guests find one particularly odious man has gone - whereabouts and reasons unknown. Such a coincidental resemblance to a work of fiction is surely impossible; therefore, it appears to be possible.
As the guests disappear, one by one, Zoe resolves to beat a hasty retreat - but her car won't start. She calls her friend, amateur sleuth/little librarian Jenny Weston, but Jenny will have to wait out a storm off Lake Superior before she can come to the rescue. If Zoe's to stay alive to greet Jenny when she eventually arrives, she'll have to draw on everything she knows about Agatha Christie's devilish plots.
✽✽✽✽✽✽✽✽
Zoe Zola is a writer who is writing a biography on the life of author Agatha Christie. When she receives a black-edged envelope, it's not the first time she's ever seen one. It always means death. And it's an omen she thought ended with the death of her own mother. Because it seemed her mother had sinned in the eyes of her family, and each time an envelope arrived, it meant the loss of one more family member she would never see again.
So Zoe doesn't open the letter, merely looks at it. She thought she was done with her mother's family, they would never find her. But now...when her neighbor Dora arrives, she sees the letter, and when Dora's daughter Jenny comes to Zoe's home, she finds both her mother and Zoe staring at it. So Jenny opens it - and finds not a death notice, but an invitation to a webinar on Agatha Christie.
After much indecision, Zoe decides to attend, and Jenny will drive her there. Jenny, for her part, has decided she can't marry the man who loves her but doesn't know why. So she's going to visit her sister Lisa, a documentary filmmaker, while Zoe is at the webinar, and will return to drive her home. But will either things turn out the way they want? Or will Zoe find herself in a bizarre twist of Christie's famous And Then There Were None?...
This is the first time I've made a foray into this author's works, and more than likely it will be the last. The book is...very dark, to say the least. It's also full of revenge and hatred, much more than any cozy I've ever read, or should be labeled. I'm not sure if the author was perhaps trying to "recreate" a combination of Christie's And Then There Were None and Murder On the Orient Express, but if so, it falls far short. Christie's works are witty and highly entertaining, and this one is neither.
The characters are not people I would ever want to know or spend time with, which is essential in a book. Even with Zoe's difficult past, she states how she is happy, but she's not. She has walls that people will never get through - and you can't have that many walls around your soul and be truly happy. She takes personal offense at things people say - the way people say things, because why should you walk on eggshells around them so as not to offend them? - even though no offense is made, and subtly attacks others.
Dora is just Dora - seemingly happy but refusing to confront her daughters about anything, for some odd reason. I'm not saying she should be combative, far from it; but if you can't have discussions with your own children about life - and they think it's interfering instead - well, something is really wrong. Both her daughters are dysfunctional and she won't confront them because they won't talk to her if she does. So what was she doing why they were growing up? Ignoring them? Leaving them to their own devices instead of developing a healthy relationship with them? Just figuring if she let them do whatever they wanted there would be no future problems?
The older daughter, Lisa, would rather live on twigs and berries than worry about having financial stability (she can make documentaries till the cows come home, but if no one is going to pay to see them, what good does it do?) while the younger, Jenny, has a man who's in love with her and wants to marry her, and just like her mother, she won't sit down and talk out the problems so the relationship can progress. She'd rather just walk away. Do these sound like people you want to spend time with? And these women aren't just out of their teens - Lisa is 40, and Jenny is 38! That one threw me a little bit.
Then there were the problems which popped up before I even got halfway into the book: I had a difficult time believing that a guy Jenny had gone to high school with but hadn't seen since then would just proposition her after about twenty minutes of talking to each other. Really? He tells her he had a crush on her in high school and then wants to jump in the sack with her. Right.
Then, when Zoe got to the lodge, Jenny went in with her. Almost immediately the proprietor Emily Brent, started talking about Jenny leaving. Zoe should have decided to go with her. If Emily hemmed and hawed and decided she could find a room for Jenny after all, then Zoe would have known immediately why she was there. It didn't make any sense - missed clues on her part, and she was writing the biography of Christie! The very minute Emily grabbed Jenny's arm to shove her out the door should have alerted them both. But it didn't. And therefore, I couldn't take the book seriously after that. When danger slaps you in the face, you don't turn the other cheek. You run like hell.
Unfortunately, Zoe and Jenny didn't take the hint, but I did, and I refuse to read books that will wind up making me angry or irritated, which this book would have done if I'd read it without skipping bits and pieces. Especially when I got to the end and realized I was right.
This was a story of using someone to get revenge on another person. Using them to even a score. Not even caring about their emotions, their physical being, the end result they would have to live with. Regardless of that outcome, there was nothing that made it right, or made it seem like it would have been worth it. Is it worth it to a human being to lose part of your soul to aid someone who destroyed that which you loved most? I don't think so, at least not in my opinion. To bury the anger you feel at realizing you were played like a violin and not be able to do anything about it? Sorry, but perhaps if things had turned out differently; if there had been justice for Zoe; I might have liked the book better. There wasn’t even justice for the reader.
https://www.amazon.com/Then-They-Were-Doomed-Library/dp/1643850008/ref
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2916010409
More on Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli's Books: https://www.fantasticfiction.com/b/elizabeth-kane-buzzelli/
No comments:
Post a Comment