Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

First of all, I missed the 23rd because it was the first school night we’ve had since mid-March, and I had other things on my mind. (So much weirdness in 2020!) Secondly, I finished listening to An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good yesterday, and it can go straight into the library book drop on my way to Costco this morning if I review it now, so…

Eh. That really is how I felt about this one, and I wanted to really enjoy it. Maud’s complete ammorality, however, was a bit of a turnoff. (Is “ammorality” a word? Essentially, by the end of the book I felt she was a likely sociopath.) Being a nasty sort of person doesn’t mean that someone DESERVES to die, and anyway, I’m with Hercule Poirot–I don’t approve of murder. (If you haven’t read Agatha Christie, the idea is that yes, some people DO deserve to die, but murder isn’t good for the murderer. You get to thinking that YOU get to decide whether a person deserves to live or die, and that never ends well.) Perhaps if I preferred harder crime novels to cozies, I might have enjoyed this more, but Maud isn’t particularly sympathetic. (She’s also not a cohesive or believable character for me, but that’s an entirely different issue.) Tursten’s writing–or rather, the translation thereof–is amusing, and I did enjoy a specific bit here and there, but as a whole, the book failed to resonate with me. Its best audience is probably a mystery reader who most enjoys the planning and execution of the crime over fuller insight into its characters; if that’s you, it might be a nice little read.*

*One last thing–the last story is sort of told twice, from differing points of view, and I didn’t appreciate what that did to the pacing when none of the rest of the stories were. Do with that as you will.