Friday, November 8, 2024

Deadly Dog Days

Dog Days Mystery Book 1

Author:    Jamie Blair
Genre:     Mystery

Paperback; Digital Book (Audiobook Available)
ISBN #:    9781705836378
Independently Published
220 Pages
$13.95; $3.99 Amazon
September 8, 2019

⭐⭐


New to the historic town of Metamora, Indiana, Cameron Cripps-Hayman is looking to make friends with her neighbors.  What she isn't looking for is one of their bodies floating in the canal.

When she and her estranged husband, the town sheriff, are both named suspects for the murder, Cameron takes crime into her own hands, teaming up with her eccentric co-workers who dub themselves the Metamora Action Agency.

As if hunting for a murderer with two high school geniuses, the town drunk, and an elderly kleptomaniac isn't hard enough, Cameron adopts the five mangy guard dogs of her deceased neighbor.  But maybe a stint at playing gatekeeper is just what she needs to come face-to-face with the killer and save another neighbor from being the next victim.

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Cameron Cripps-Hayman is estranged from her town sheriff husband, and they have a lot of issues between them to overcome if they can even get along.  Add in a mother-in-law from hell, and you see the reason she left him in the first place.  Unfortunately, she's still living in the house owned by her mother-in-law, and it doesn't sit right with the woman.
 
She manages a group of misfits who have been in trouble with the law, and they work on a help line for those in need.  But when a body is found, they all want to help with the investigation to find a killer.  That is, if Cameron doesn't tell her ex about it.

But trouble follows, and Cameron might just find out that she's next in line to be killed...

Normally, I try to give first in series books a good chance.  But this one just had too many problems, and I'm not sure if I'll read another one or not.  First off, there were just too many characters (42!) so you couldn't keep straight who was doing what.  There were little to none clues to the murderer, so we were forced to read through a book full of nasty people -- her mother-n-law, her stepdaughter, her estranged husband.  Not one had a decent quality to them, and I was really hoping she'd dump them all and just go back with her sister where she could have a decent life and give up eating cookies to deal with her problems and unhappiness.

No such luck.  (But we knew that, anyway).  I would have been happy if her mother-in-law wasa second victim.  The protagonist didn't have a backbone and wouldn't stand up to anyone -- not even her cheating husband.  I won't be reading any more in this series.  There are too many good books out there to read instead.  Why punish myself with characters I can't stand?


More on Jamie Blair's Books:    https://www.fantasticfiction.com/b/jamie-blair/

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