2018 American Fiction Awards Finalist –Mystery/Humor 2018 PenCraft Awards Winner for Literary Excellence “A truly hilarious mystery in the tradition of Janet Evanovich, Thomas Davidson and Rich Leder.” –Best Thrillers Murder has come once more to the seaside town of Crab Cove, testing the mettle of “almost handsome” Detective Simon Grave and his “nearly invisible” partner, Sergeant Barry Blunt, … mettle of “almost handsome” Detective Simon Grave and his “nearly invisible” partner, Sergeant Barry Blunt, who investigate a locked-room mystery with a significant twist: the prime suspects are in the locked room, not the victim, a logic-defying situation that challenges the team at every turn.
As if murder weren’t enough, they must also investigate the simultaneous disappearance of The MacGuffin Trophy from that same locked room, the studio of artist Whitney Waters, famous for her stylized paintings of red herrings.
Who is/are the killer(s)? How did he/she/they get out of the locked room with the trophy, kill the victim, and return unnoticed by others in the room? These and other questions, including the limits of logic and the meaning of life, are posed and perhaps even answered in this quirky, near-future mystery. Yes, there are robots.
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If this book was a structure in Paris, France it would be the Empire State Building.
Seriously funny characters and situations. The science fantasy (i.e. Smithers & crew) kept me guessing.
A fun read. unexpected twists and really quirky characters
Enjoyable change of pace from what I have read lately
enjoyed but defintiely odd. didn’t think the author would be able to tie all the mysteries together – but they did!
P G Woodhouse meets Douglas Adams. A very fun read.
what a story……bizarre who done it
Fun to read when you don’t want to tax your brain too much!
The mystery is that someone was murdered while all the people in the house were locked in a single room in the mansion, simultaneous with a valuable yachting trophy being stolen from that same room. The mansion is filled with servant robots that you can barely tell from real humans (which leads to some predictability) . I think the author tried a little too hard for humor: Detective Grave tends to lapse into a British accent for no discernible reason, and his sidekick police officer has a such a bland personality and appearance that he appears as a blur and people wonder where the disembodied voice is coming from. That might have been funny once, but the joke is repeated on every other page. Ok, we get it; he’s bland and melts into the woodwork. Give it a rest. The best bit is that Grave drinks Duct Tape Chardonnay, “the wine that can fix anything.” I also picked up a new vocabulary word (I like books that give me that): concatenate. This is the first in a series but I won’t read others because I’ve had enough of the invisible police officer joke.
The book has a locked-room mystery, but I doubt I’ll ever finish it. Every person, scene, and object is described in such detail that it drags everything to a halt. The additional comparison-type descriptions ARE funny, but there’s just too much description and not enough plot development.
It is supposedly a humorous mystery. While the mystery is there, the humor certainly is not. Lame jokes that aren’t funny to begin with are repeated over and over throughout the book in the hopes that they will become funny the 20th time that they are mentioned. They do not. The mystery is original and somewhat surprising and that is the only reason this book received two starts. Thank God it was free.
One of the worst detective stories I’ve ever read. The author’s efforts to inject humor are cringingly forced and stupid as is a plot that has robots committing murders. The book should be labeled as science fiction.
Not quite my cup of tea, but fans of British comedy would probably love it.
Started reading. Probably a good plot, but I could not stand the filthy language.
I love humor in mystery stories. But when I realized I had just read 4 paragraphs, each describing a different feature of the guys face with a wry comment about the feature, it became too difficult to follow the story. (I didn’t want to try and follow the story line by picking out the one item from every paragraph that actually told the story.). So I deleted the book from my iPad.