Set in a small Wisconsin town where everybody has known everybody forever, Totally Buzzed is a murder mystery with a lot of spunk, a lot of humor--and a few flaws. Protagonist Buzz Miller, who narrates most of the story, is a retired cop who discovers a body beneath her parents' farmhouse and gets pulled in on the murder investigation with one of her three sisters in tow. Buzz herself is a kick in the pants, and her earthy, no-nonsense narration and humorous descriptions of her neighbors and relatives are worth the read in themselves.
The intriguing storyline offers up enough twists and new developments to keep a reader's attention, beginning with Buzz's foray under the house to retrieve an ugly floor-lamp with a cowboy-boot base, and dragging out instead a cowboy boot attached to a body. The local crime-solving team of Buzz, her best-buddy the Sheriff, and her bumbling and loudmouthed sister Mag uncover developments that include illegal importation of plants, international drug smuggling, thoroughbred horses, and more murders--not to mention the (sometimes bizarre) shenanigans of the hometown folks while the investigation unfolds.
The crime gets solved, some romance advances, and I enjoyed getting to know Buzz (and her dogs, and the hometown folks)... I will say, at the same time, that a few aspects of the writing chafed at me. While Buzz's narrative voice is slangy and down-home and enjoyably illustrative of her character, some of the dialogue (including hers) is oddly stilted. The character whose narrative voice uses "ain't" and "ass" suddenly speaks more formally when she's speaking aloud within the story, using words like "cannot" and "does not" which no informal speaker uses in un-contracted forms. If this seems like a petty complaint, I mention it because the stiff usage in dialogue repeatedly jolted me out of the moment--particularly from Buzz, whose narrative style proves she ain't that kinda talker.
Some of the physical humor is rather too vaudevillean for my taste--too many instances of people's faces ending up in other people's plates, for example--but no doubt that's a matter of personal preference. I did enjoy the character quirks, descriptions, and humorous dialogue.
Buzz's detective instincts include a gift from her Irish heritage--visions to which her mother refers as "The Sheeny," and which illuminate scenes like the murder of the woman whose body was stowed beneath the house. I'm down with the idea of the visions themselves, but given their inclusion in the story, I was puzzled (and irritated) by the fact that Buzz didn't put them to use at all in the course of the investigation. She describes the vision itself in detail, but none of the information she might have gleaned from it is put to use as she tackles the mystery, which leaves me wondering why it's included in the story at all. It's not the only loose end in the book--there are a number of times when I wanted to holler for the characters' attention to prompt them to ask the obvious question or pursue a line of inquiry... But then, they did manage in the end to solve the thing without my help. ;)
Totally Buzzed is billed as the first in the "Miller Sisters Mystery" series, and I expect that as the author continues with the series, she may find a more comfortable balance between the storytelling and the "home-folks exposition," which tended at times to slow down the telling over-much. The initial scene featuring the discovery of the body and the launch of the investigation took a full fifth of the book, and I was ready for the story to get going already. Having said that, I enjoyed the Miller Sisters well enough that I'll be reading the next installment to find out!
