Death at a B & B

I would like to preface this review by saying that I have never read anything by this author before. Also, I used to be a huge fan of cozy mysteries - would read nothing but, really - but haven't really read any in the past 15-20 years and have been trying to recapture some of my love for them. Unfortunately, I am starting to think that ship has well and truly sailed.

I did not like this book. I just didn't enjoy it.

This is a novella from a cozy mystery series that I picked up randomly because it was free. And is well loved on Goodreads. However, I personally find that this novella does not work as a stand alone at all. There's too many people and things that are ill-explained, not explained at all or only explained after the fact. This is written with established fans in mind that know these people and their relationships and their problems.

The storytelling here is very jerky and nothing is described well. At the beginning of the story, Nora leads her best friend (Tina) to Tina's vehicle. Tina gets into the vehicle and, after a sentence or two, guns the gas. The conversation continues and that's when I realize that Nora is in the vehicle too. Or there's a character on screen for the first time and a rough physical description of him is given (pretty much the only time a character is described at all physically) and I figure that he is someone Nora doesn't know. Then I find out that it is the local handyman and Nora has hired him many times to do work for her.

There are plenty of scene switches that give me absolutely no sense of where the scene is taking place. There's no sense of location or scenery. I can picture things, but only because my imagination is filling in what the author fails to describe, because really all that is being described for the most part is talking heads.

Also, I don't want to get into it, but the people are as universally terrible as I am starting to realize is par for the course in cozy mysteries. (And all emotions are as overblown, too.)

I do have one other novella by this author that I got for free at the same time - in a different series, thankfully - so I might give it a go later just to see if it maybe works better.