Friday 29 February 2008

Book ~ "Murder 101" - Maggie Barbieri (2007)

From Amazon.com ~ Alison Bergeron, newly divorced English professor at St. Thomas College, is having a difficult time. Someone stole her car, so she has to walk to the train station for the commute to work. Once there, she finds two homicide detectives waiting in her office to ask why the body of one of her students is in the trunk of her car. Trying to remove herself from the list of suspects is not easy. She also has to deal with the distraught family of the dead student, bail her ex-husband out of jail, and grade final exams for her Shakespeare class. For some reason, those boring exams are the object of a great deal of attention. As if that weren't enough, one of the homicide detectives, Bobby Crawford, is taking a romantic interest in Alison, and the pompous college president may decide that her involvement in the case is bad for the school's reputation. This is an entertaining debut and a series to follow for fans of gentle academic mysteries.

This wasn't a bad book but it certainly wasn't a great book.

I found Alison extremely wimpy at times ... she faints and barfs non-stop. Yet off she goes putting herself in danger at others. The extremes are too much. And her ex-husband, Ray, is a dog yet she still helps him when he gets arrested and she has the patience, after all he had done to her in the marriage (which she continuously whines about), to be nice and polite to him. And her best friend, Max, is just annoying!

And the ending (solving the murder) was pretty blah.

I would read another in this series but I wouldn't go looking for it.

2 comments:

Jay said...

I hate taking the time to read a whole book and have it turn out blah.

Bubba's Mom said...

Hey Teena, thanks for visiting my blog. I am a big mystery fan myself. My favorite bookstore where we are in Texas is called "Murder by the Book" and they only stock mysteries. I also belong to a book club which meets monthly at our local Barnes & Noble, but we don't read just mysteries. What I hate is reading until you are more than halfway through the book - what I call the "point of no return" - and trying to decide is it worth finishing or not.