Story for the Week
I have a confession to make. I have never seen a single episode of Murder, She Wrote. Not one. 🫣 (There are other popular shows I haven’t watched—Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad—but those don’t go with the theme of today’s story. 😉)
So anyway…I do love a good investigative series. I grew up watching Starsky & Hutch, Adam-12, The Rockford Files, Quincy M.E., and CHiPs with my dad. Today, I still love police procedurals like Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, Blue Bloods, Criminal Minds (What Do We Have on the DVR?). Murder, She Wrote, though, never appealed to me. I had just started college when it first aired, so I was a little limited by whatever people were watching on the televisions in the lounges, but I also wasn’t really their target demographic at 18.
What I find just a touch ironic about that is that I grew up loving mysteries…book mysteries in particular (Nancy Drew Meets Fight Club). In fact, the vast majority of the books I checked out from the library when I was a kid were based on kid detectives—Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, the Boxcar Children. Honestly, I couldn’t read them fast enough.
A good mystery keeps the reader interested, gives just enough information to keep you guessing and wanting to read more to get to solving the crime. Mysteries require teasing of what’s to come or what might have happened so that when a chapter ends on a mini cliffhanger, you want to keep reading to get back to that plot line. Pacing is critical because the reader needs to feel like they’re figuring things out when they’re really completely off base. For me, a great mystery will get to the big reveal with me thinking, “I did not see that coming!”
But amateurs solving crimes on a regular basis? Being able to suspend disbelief becomes critically important here. We have to believe that it’s possible for the main character to solve a crime. From my perspective, unless there’s some sort of background in investigation or law enforcement, these have to be funny and lighthearted to be at all believable. The main character has to be flawed enough to be enjoyable and lucky enough to get the job done.
One of my favorite adult series about an amateur sleuth is Liz Talley’s Cricket Crosby Capers (Shout Out to Some of My Favorite Movie Quotes, Haute Couture? More Like No Couture, Knowing Your Talent and the Importance of Being Humbled). Cricket owns an antique store but dips her toe into the world of private investigation when she discovers her husband is cheating. She thinks she’s good at it, and she even takes a course to become a private investigator. In reality, she’s clumsy and not at all discreet, usually getting herself into compromising situations. And her stories are so much fun to read.
I just finished an upcoming release by a young adult author making her way into adult fiction. The story definitely parallels Murder, She Wrote. In fact, it’s almost Murder, She Wrote within Murder, She Wrote. The main character writes mysteries about an amateur sleuth who bartends at night and solves crimes during the day. As an author who researches crimes and how to solve them for her books, she believes that she can investigate a murder during a wedding. I found it really hard to suspend my disbelief on this one.
Book Review
⭐⭐
2 Stars for She Doesn’t Have a Clue by Jenny Elder Moke
326 pages
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Publication Date: January 21, 2025
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and Minotaur Books.
Publisher’s Description
A high-end wedding on a private island off the coast of Seattle sounds like something out of a magazine. But for bestselling mystery author Kate Valentine, it’s more like a nightmare.
Why Kate agreed to attend her ex-fiancé’s wedding is its own enigma, but she’ll plaster on a fake smile for two nights, with the aid of free champagne, naturally. And because the groom happens to be her editor, she’ll try to finish a draft of her latest Loretta Starling mystery as a wedding gift.
When the bride is poisoned and Kate stumbles across a dead body, she finds herself in a real-life mystery that eerily echoes the plot of her latest novel. And the only person who seems willing to help Kate catch the killer is Jake Hawkins, aka: the Hostralian; aka: Kate’s biggest romantic regret.
As the wine flows and the weather threatens to hold every guest hostage, bitter resentments and long-held grudges surface amongst the colorful crowd. Anyone could be capable of murder, it seems. What would Loretta do? Unfortunately, Kate doesn’t have a clue.
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Main Characters:
- Kate Valentine – best-selling author of the Loretta Starling mystery series, tends to live her life considering what Loretta would do, broke off her engagement to Spencer six months prior
- Jake Hawkins – former professional surfer from Australia turned elite travel guide, worked with Kate on a couple of travel/adventure books
- Loretta Starling – the fictional main character of Kate’s series of books, works as a bartender in the evening and an amateur sleuth during the day
- Spencer Lieman – Kate’s literary agent at Simon Says and former fiancé, started dating Kennedy almost immediately after he and Kate broke up
- Kennedy Hempstead – heir to the Hempstead fortune, insisted on having her wedding to Spencer on the family’s private island
- Rebecca Hempstead – matriarch of the Hempstead family, controls the disbursements of the inheritance money to all of her nieces and nephews
- A whole host of characters too numerous to mention who could be the killer on the island
Based on the description alone, this story has a lot of potential, but for me, the execution left a lot to be desired. Set on the private Hempstead island off the Pacific Northwest coast, the story centers around the wedding of Spencer and Kennedy. As Spencer’s former fiancée, Kate is surprised she received an invitation, with a hand-written note from Rebecca Hempstead. She’s even more surprised to see Jake Hawkins…and to find out that Kennedy invited him and told Spencer that he is Kate’s plus one.
When a storm knocks out power and prevents people from leaving the island, someone tries to poison Kennedy and another person ends up dead. To make matters worse, the crimes seem to be following the plot of one of Kate’s books, turning all eyes on her as the prime suspect. Chaos ensues, and Kate decides that she needs to channel her inner Loretta and figure out who’s behind all of it, all the while sharing a room with Jake and trying to calm the attraction she’s had to him since “the incident” two years ago.
I feel like this is supposed to be a campy, fun amateur mystery, almost like Clue. You have a gossipy wedding planner who can’t talk about former clients by name but wants to talk about all of them. “Our clients value discretion above all else, so while nondisclosure agreements prevent me from naming names, let’s just say I’ve fixed a tear in a bridal gown of a certain American to a certain royal and personally stocked the bar on the private plane of a certain billionaire on the way to his private island wedding.”
You have the nieces and nephews of Rebecca all waiting for their own inheritances. Add to that the authors of Simon Says protesting contract delays with management, and there are a lot of people who might want to see one or two people dead. Since the whole book centers around Kate’s point of view, we know she is not the killer, but someone is definitely trying to set her up.
As I said, there is a lot of potential here. I did not guess the killer, so in that respect, the story did its job. When the killer is revealed near the end, I was definitely surprised, but the convoluted reason for the crimes and the way we get there…whew, it was a lot of work.
First, I had a hard time keeping everyone straight. All of the nieces and nephews have problems and reasons they need money, but their characters don’t feel different enough to be able to remember who’s who. Kate is oblivious to the issues the other authors are having with their contracts despite the fact that she claims to be friends with some of them. And every time someone seems to get stuck somewhere in the mansion where the wedding is being held, there’s a secret passage discovered. Every time. It’s too convenient.
Second, this is apparently the author’s first foray into adult fiction from young adult. There’s the obvious romance element between Kate and Jake, with a little added tension because Jake seems to think that Kate is not over Spencer. The author includes two steamy scenes between Kate and Jake, but they just feel awkward and unrealistic. In one of them, Kate gets trapped and almost falls to the bottom of an old manual lift, covered in cobwebs and spiders, when Jake comes to her rescue. She literally strips off her clothes because a spider crawls into her bra…and then she and Jake have this supposedly romantic and amazing sexual encounter. Ewww!
Third, I couldn’t stop thinking to myself, Kate is not an investigator! She’s a writer. Yet she goes through life asking herself what Loretta would do, daydreaming her way through scenes where other characters literally have to snap her out of it because she’s writing the scene in her head. She’s flighty and thinks that because she researches for her books, that it makes her an investigator. She keeps talking to Jake about her murder board and her wall of suspects and how they’re going to solve the crime. She…is…a…writer!
And finally, the fact that Kate feels the need to investigate hinges on the fact that no one can get on or off the island because of the storm, so the police are nowhere in sight. Convenient, since no one can control the weather. But you expect readers to believe that a wedding of this magnitude, an heiress to a huge fortune, would not have ample security or law enforcement in place?
Every time the author included an excerpt from one of Kate’s books, it pulled me out of the story. Every time Kate talked about “her investigation,” I rolled my eyes. I just really didn’t enjoy this at all.
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