It’s a good thing I bought Whispers of Murder for free, a promotion from the author Cheryl Bradshaw on twitter, because I wouldn’t have been happy about spending $2 on it. I was aware it was a novella when I purchased it and I had read some of the reviews. The reviews were mixed, some saying that there were bad typos and others that were singing praise. There was an author note saying that originally the wrong file was uploaded and that the problem was fixed, so I gave it the benefit of doubt.
It wasn’t the writing that made this a poor read for me, it was the plot line. Even in a novella, I expect mysteries to be just that, mysteries. There wasn’t a whole lot of solving in this book and it had almost every cliche known to the amateur detective genre. (If this wasn’t supposed to be an amateur detective book, I’m not exactly sure what it was supposed to be.) It only left you guessing “who did it” because of the massive amount of characters shoved into the story.
The characters weren’t fantastic, they weren’t unique enough to remember and I couldn’t really care about them. Even in a novella I expect good characters, maybe I’m picky, but if you can’t make me care about the characters why should I read it?
I read this in one sitting, which was a plus of novellas, and there wasn’t any glaring typos like some of the reviews said, but I can’t figure out how this book made it into the top 100 of Amazon’s mysteries list. A quick and easy read, somewhat enjoyable, but not highly recommended.
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