Author: Brianna Bates
Genre: Mystery
Digital Book
ASIN #: B01AE3OXCB
Independently Published
182 Pages
$2.99 Amazon
January 22, 2016
⭐⭐⭐
Creepy meeting place aside, the last thing you'd expect to find at a ladies' diet club meeting would be a dead body, right? And although voluptuous amateur sleuth Missy DeMeanor has seen more than one body, this is different. This is one of her oldest friends.
Having tried almost everything -- she's exercising at the gym and she eats less than her petite best friend Noreen, but she seems to gain weight just standing still -- finally, Missy's decided to accept the invitation of her oldest friend Karen to join a secretive, ladies only, invitation only, contract required diet club. But at Missy's first meeting, Karen, who is obviously ill, is discovered dead on the bathroom floor. The police decide that death was caused by an extreme diet and quickly close the case.
As hard as it is to accpet her friend's death, Missy just cannot bring herself to believe that Karen would have put her health at risk with a weight-loss plan Karen herself described as "the craziest diet" she'd heard about. Missy keeps insisting Karen would never knowingly have ingested a harmful substance -- so who gave it to her? But her ex-boyfriend, Grove City's chief detective Tyler Brock, isn't listening. And so, given Tyler's refusal to dig deeper, it's up to her to solve the mystery if anyone's going to.
Through the haze of her own grief, she bravely -- "recklessly," in Tyler's words -- probes the complicated turns Karen's life has taken over the years she and Missy remained close at heart, but geographically removed. And, as in all good murder mysteries, secrets tumble out one after another, making Missy wonder if it's even possible to know another person.
Meanwhile, she still has feelings for Tyler that make her too uncomfortable to be around him, knowing that he's still trying to work things out with his estranged wife. Yet he's alternately flirtatious and impatient with her endeavors to unmask a killer...almost as if he still cares about her and it trying to protect her.
✽✽✽✽✽✽✽✽
In this third book in the series, Missy is so frustrated with her weight that she agrees to go to a ladies' only diet club with her friend Karen. But when she gets there it's apparent that not everyone likes Karen as much as she does. Someone Karen works with hurls insults, albeit they are masked as comments, and she witnesses an altercation between Karen and another woman when Karen gets up to go to the restroom. But when Karen doesn't return in a reasonable amount of time, Missy goes looking for her and finds her dead on the bathroom floor.
While the police deem it an infection that killed Karen, Missy refuses to believe it. And without help from her friend Noreen or even Detective Tyler Brock, she's on her own in another city trying to solve Karen's death. But she's stepping on toes and making enemies herself, and if she isn't careful, the killer just might go after her...
Missy is so obsessed with being overweight that even the gym isn't helping her (and I'm wondering how often she goes); but she still drinks wine and beer. Okay... Does she not know how many calories are in there? Perhaps she should go for sparkling water instead. Just sayin'
Anyway, she refuses to believe that Karen's death is an accident, so she insists on finding out who killed her, even though all the evidence points to Karen doing it herself by using an extreme diet (which is really distasteful and I wish the author would not have kept on mentioning it. It made me cringe more than once. Sorry.) So she questions outright people Karen knew, and discovers things about her friend that she wished she hadn't.
Still, Missy presses on until it's almost too late and then when she figures it out, it's only by luck that she's taken out of danger (which we know she will be). This is a short mystery, and probably the weakest in the series so far; I really wish Missy would either stop carping about her weight or do something. As I've said before, voluptuous is more like Sophia Loren; curvy, but attractive just the same. Definitely not fat. So if she's voluptuous, how can she consider herself fat? It just means she's a larger, attractive woman. Maybe Missy needs a dictionary.
At any rate, the entire book was Missy trying to find her friend's killer and worrying about her weight. There were some issues with Tyler, but since he was practically nonexistent, none of it really mattered, in my opinion. However, I am going to finish the series since I have gotten this far. Three stars for keeping me entertained over an afternoon.
More on Brianna Bates's Books: https://www.fantasticfiction.com/b/brianna-bates/
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