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Book Review: The Dead-End Job Mysteries by Elaine Viets
Signet Books, New York 2003-2005
Elaine Viets's Dead-End Job Mysteries: Shop till You Drop, Murder Between the Covers, Dying to Call You, and Just Murdered, are all set on Fort Lauderdale's posh Las Olas shopping boulevard. Her heroine, Helen Hawthorne, has escaped from a bad marriage in Kansas City to a life on the economic margins of high society (or what passes for it here.) The result is four entertaining mysteries with humor, an engaging amateur sleuth, solid plots, all set in our tropical paradise. We recommend them highly as really great reads.
Yes, they follow a formula. Part of the fun is knowing, or thinking you know, what is going to happen, and then getting tweaked by an author who is one or two steps ahead of you.
Poor (literally) Helen has to work off the books so her rotten ex-husband and the Kansas City cops can't trace her. Her meager earnings allow her to live in an old apartment building in walking distance of her employment. Viets has worked in all the jobs she puts Helen into and has a great eye for the setting and the people Helen encounters: her friends, lovers, employers, and the high strung, up scale customers she has to deal with in, respectively, a dress shop, a book store, a telemarketing sweat shop and a bridal salon. While the books are not meant to be serious literature, Viets does not skimp on plot, character or setting just because she has hit on a great genre hook. The vicissitudes of Helen's precarious circumstances are dealt with honestly although with a lot of humor. As in all series like this, the police, while always either giving her a hard time or ignoring her, never seem to wonder how she just happens to be around all these dead bodies. And, of course, her intrepidity wins out in the end with the villain in cuffs.
We have heard Elaine speak several times, at book signings and at meetings of the South Florida Mystery Writers Association and she does great stand-up comedy, recounting either her own experiences in these dead-end jobs or Helen's predicaments. If you ever get a chance to hear her, at a book signing or whatever, grab it, she is as funny as anyone who shows up on the Comedy Channel (OK maybe that's not much, she is better than most of them.)
There is a whole world of mystery writers here in South Florida and Elaine, who lives in Hollywood, is one of the divas of that group, frequently lecturing to newcomers in the field on the intricacies of the business. If you have any illusions that writing mysteries or other genre books is easy, glamorous or even financially profitable, you need to hear her, too. It is a grind, and you can only be successful and enjoy it, if you love it, because the odds are against you.
I will be doing a mystery review monthly to introduce you to some of the best of our South Florida writers. Stay tuned to this channel.
Signet Books, New York 2003-2005
Elaine Viets's Dead-End Job Mysteries: Shop till You Drop, Murder Between the Covers, Dying to Call You, and Just Murdered, are all set on Fort Lauderdale's posh Las Olas shopping boulevard. Her heroine, Helen Hawthorne, has escaped from a bad marriage in Kansas City to a life on the economic margins of high society (or what passes for it here.) The result is four entertaining mysteries with humor, an engaging amateur sleuth, solid plots, all set in our tropical paradise. We recommend them highly as really great reads.
Yes, they follow a formula. Part of the fun is knowing, or thinking you know, what is going to happen, and then getting tweaked by an author who is one or two steps ahead of you.
Poor (literally) Helen has to work off the books so her rotten ex-husband and the Kansas City cops can't trace her. Her meager earnings allow her to live in an old apartment building in walking distance of her employment. Viets has worked in all the jobs she puts Helen into and has a great eye for the setting and the people Helen encounters: her friends, lovers, employers, and the high strung, up scale customers she has to deal with in, respectively, a dress shop, a book store, a telemarketing sweat shop and a bridal salon. While the books are not meant to be serious literature, Viets does not skimp on plot, character or setting just because she has hit on a great genre hook. The vicissitudes of Helen's precarious circumstances are dealt with honestly although with a lot of humor. As in all series like this, the police, while always either giving her a hard time or ignoring her, never seem to wonder how she just happens to be around all these dead bodies. And, of course, her intrepidity wins out in the end with the villain in cuffs.
We have heard Elaine speak several times, at book signings and at meetings of the South Florida Mystery Writers Association and she does great stand-up comedy, recounting either her own experiences in these dead-end jobs or Helen's predicaments. If you ever get a chance to hear her, at a book signing or whatever, grab it, she is as funny as anyone who shows up on the Comedy Channel (OK maybe that's not much, she is better than most of them.)
There is a whole world of mystery writers here in South Florida and Elaine, who lives in Hollywood, is one of the divas of that group, frequently lecturing to newcomers in the field on the intricacies of the business. If you have any illusions that writing mysteries or other genre books is easy, glamorous or even financially profitable, you need to hear her, too. It is a grind, and you can only be successful and enjoy it, if you love it, because the odds are against you.
I will be doing a mystery review monthly to introduce you to some of the best of our South Florida writers. Stay tuned to this channel.
posted by Jack Latona at 10:38 AM
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