Started well but failed to live up to expectation.
Many thanks to NetGalley and to Storm Publishing for letting me see an advance reader’s copy of Over Her Dead Bodyby HJ Garbett.
This is the first time I’ve read anything by the author and the blurb and the cover had me excited to start. Indeed, the story opened with a bang and grabbed me instantly. Unfortunately, the rest of the book didn’t live up to expectation.
Ruth is on a mission. A mission she seems to have been planning for 2 years. And I was agog. Then Bill and Ben arrived and I started to suspect the story might not be as grown up as I’d hoped.
The actual mystery itself is good, although I guessed the perp as soon as we met them. The humour is also good, at first, as well as the slightly fruity, adult language. But then it gets boring and repetitive and sometimes a little too over coarse.
The characters were completely unbelievable. For example, who would allow their new husband’s former wife to come and live with them? How many police detectives would include a suspect in the investigation?
Nothing in the description alerts the reader to the LGBQT+ language, and that may cause some readers to put the book down.
There were a lot of characters with similar names, that got a bit confusing in places. Such as Cecillia, Cis, Carlota, Chlo, Claudia and Clive all starting with the letter C (other letters of the alphabet are available, folks). We had Esha and Tasha, and we had Phil and Bill.
And there were so many characters, a cast of thousands it seemed, that by Chapter 3, when Nico arrived, I was really starting to lose track of everyone.
There were continuity issues, such as readers suddenly discovering that Ruth wears glasses in Chapter 4 when they fell off.
But the most annoying thing for me were the American expressions, such as creek (we don’t have creeks in London), snickered (we don’t snicker in the UK, we snigger), and morgue (we have mortuaries in the UK). Especially when the main character had a go at Tasha for spelling cancelled the American way…
I was determined to make it to the end, though. And I did. But I was glad I did as I rarely fail to finish a book I’ve started.
Three stars.
⭐️⭐️⭐️
