Book #2: Yankee Doodle Dead by Carolyn Hart

Book #2
Title: Yankee Doodle Dead
Author: Carolyn Hart
Pages: 300
Grade: D
Buyability: 0/10
Status: Owned (gift) - giving away

I know I should not be allowed to judge a book based on its cover, its age, or the fact its part of a mystery series I've never read. But this book was just awful. I went into it not that excited, it was an uncorrected proof that somehow ended up being my book that I got on Xmas eve this year. I have a hunch my mom snagged it from the Winnipeg Public Library book sale - no wonder it was on sale is all I have to say.

The story essentially follows a sleuthing couple with no credentials to be detectives - the girl, Annie I think?, owns a murder mystery book shop (um yeah, cause that would fly on a small tourist island), and her husband Max helps people 'find stuff' or 'figure out stuff'. I can't even put into words how many cliches popped up in this book. I'm not a massive mystery fan, but I appreciate a good one and this story didn't have any good twists. Essentially a much-disliked newcomer to the town is murdered on the fourth of July and a young, well-liked teenager accidentally finds the gun in the woods, fingering him as the suspect. Annie & Max and a small ring of help band together to interview one of 10 key suspects - but that is a whole lotta suspects and none of their motives were particularly strong or interesting. So needless to say a secret twist does happen...but it's a genuinely stupid one.

I don't really have much else to report on this book. I found it confusing, clunky, and utterly hard to get through. Perhaps you are a fan of the series (I can't think of the author's name right now) but I definitely don't plan to read another book by this author. So turned off of mysteries right now. The only thing this book did was give me inspiration for a certain style of a short, short story I had to write this week where it is 26 sentences long and each sentence begins with the next letter of the alphabet (ex: sentence one begins with the letter A, sentence two with B and so on). And even I wrote it better.