Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Compliments of a Friend by Susan Isaacs





Title: Compliments of a Friend
Author: Susan Isaacs
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Rating: WARTY!

I really had a bit of a time trying to decide how to rate this. It was not that interesting to me, but it was short (and there was no prologue! Yippee!). Unfortunately, it was in the first person, which is almost never a good thing in my book. What made me want to rate it worthy was that it featured an older woman doing the detecting. It's about time, when we're undergoing a flood of young and sassy female detectives, that someone swam upstream. Kudos to Isaacs for that.

This novel wasn't smart mouthed - although Isaacs isn't afraid to to go potty mouth when called for. I appreciated the honesty, so kudos again. What really put me off was all the snobbish brand-name-dropping. I detest novels which do that because it keeps destroying my suspension of disbelief. It's especially obnoxious when the writer tries to dismiss the name-dropping by pretending it doesn't matter, like even they are embarrassed by how pretentious they are. And on this topic, why isn't Isaacs embarrassed by the price she's asking for a 69-page ebook?

The detective part of the story wasn't that interesting to me either - there was nothing brilliant or dramatic about it. So despite my initially wanting to find this short-story 'worthy' because of the older woman PoV, it was because she offered me nothing else to rave about that she left me no choice but to rate it warty.