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Tepid plot, girlfriend's chit chat = disappointing Brit yarn...

We typically enjoy Brit authors, and tend to like most leading ladies of female authors. But we struck out on this novel, the fourth Loretta Lawson mystery from England's Joan Smith. The story starts out with a dead body discovered at the housewarming of Loretta's best friend and fellow professor, Bridget Bennett. Her pregnant girlfriend comes to stay with her for several days to recover from the shock, while the police investigate behind the scenes. For the next 200 pages, very few events advance the solving of the case, other than discovering the dead woman's identity, and much of what does happen in the case is described to us second-hand from newspaper accounts. Meanwhile the women drink tea, gossip, and discuss their problems at college - hardly adequate to entertain let alone thrill and chill. Toward the very end of the novel, some late breaking information points to Bridget's hubby Sam being involved, but then he claims Bridget committed the crime. The book then suddenly ends, except for a postscript by Loretta to her ex- (a journalist) thanking him for unearthing some information from America that spelled things out and helped in determining the perpetrator.

While every novel doesn't have to reel out endless twists and turns, or add shock value from every page, we just could hardly keep interested in such a lukewarm storyline. There was nothing to care about in terms of the crime, except that hopefully neither main character was the culprit, but we doubted that just as a matter of course. Moreover, Loretta, supposedly the amateur sleuth from other stories, doesn't really work the crime either - it just sort of ends off camera, and a narrator (Loretta's postscript) spells out the conclusion for the audience, a technique we found way short of stunning. Perhaps the biggest mystery of all is what the title was supposed to mean, as it doesn't seem to relate to anything.

Apparently Ms. Smith is an intellectual and a feminist, having published both non-fiction and learned articles on the way in which women are treated or mis-treated. While there were hints of such issues beneath the surface in this offering, they were really too subtle to contribute anything provocative to an other wise tepid book. Perhaps her non-fiction might be a better bet than Smith's attempts to entertain with mysteries such as this.