Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
More Clunky Than Charming, 19 Feb 2008
The first Tess Monaghan book left me relatively unimpressed, the pacing was sluggish, the writing clunky, the heroine more annoying than engaging, and the plotting sometimes awkward. All in all it was a pretty mediocre (though not outright bad) debut, but the Baltimore setting and generally effusive praise the series has gotten was enough to make me try the next in the series to see if Lippman had improved.
Set soon after the events of Baltimore Blues, this book finds Tess still living above her aunt's bookstore, still sharing a bed with her younger musician boyfriend Crow, and halfheartedly working as an investigator for a lawyer. A meeting with a friend from her days working as a newspaper reporter is the catalyst for her latest adventure. It involves the effort to bring pro basketball to Baltimore, and the shady background of the prime mover and shaker in this effort. Somehow, a muckraking piece on his life winds up in the paper, despite having been killed editorially, and Tess is brought in to try and figure out who did it and how.
This becomes a bit more important when the subject of the article turns up dead of an apparent suicide. As Tess pokes around the newspaper and its computer system, she also investigates one of the reporters, the suicide, and more and more. Meanwhile, there's also a subplot involving Tess's uncle, who is beaten into a coma, for reasons no one can work out. He also left a greyhound in her care, whom she names Esskay (after the local hot dog brand) and becomes an important character in his own right.
Unfortunately, Tess continues to fail to engage me as a heroine. She flails around for the truth, bumbling along full of self-pity and bitterness, lucky to be alive at the end. It doesn't help matters that the book switches away to third-person narration for some scenes. Oddly, despite Lippman's career as a newspaper journalist, some of the plotting concerning the newspaper and its operations seems very artificial and false. Finally, traditional mystery readers will find it annoying that there really aren't the clues in place for the reader to deduce "whodunnit." I'm not getting what it is that others seem to love about this series, and I'm not sure I'm willing to spend time on a third book to find out.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Merely Mediocre Mystery, 24 Aug 1998
By A Customer
For some reason, this book has garnered plenty of attention and praise. However, I found it just an okay read. The highly touted presence of Tess' new pet dog might draw animal lovers, but beware. I can say without giving a spoiler, that there are things in Charm City that will make anyone who at all likes animals extremely uncomfortable.The writing sometimes has charm, and the book goes back and forth between being mildly entertaining and boring/annoying. A couple of things that I found annoying: Despite author Laura Lippman's real-life status as a journalist, major plot points rest on "truths" about the newspaper business that are simply not true. So if you, like me, are knowledgeable about the newspaper business, you are *less* likely to solve the story's crimes. Tess has a live-in lover several years her junior and she agonizes over the age difference. Then she becomes romantically interested in a much older man and not only does the age difference not bother her, she *never even notes the irony* that it doesn't bother her. This is just silly, and sloppy. Charm City is not hideous, it's just an okay read that doesn't entirely play fair and doesn't reflect the realities of print journalism. If you'd like to read a great mystery with more than a bit of charm going for it, I recommend passing up Charm City and instead trying a book by Robert Crais, one of Carolyn Hart's Henrie O mysteries, or anything by Marcia Muller. I think you'll find any of these a smarter, more substantial read -- and if you're going to read a book, might as well make it a great one!
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
It's Okay..., 7 Dec 1998
By A Customer
... but nothing special. It sort of reads like a first draft. There are plotholes and inconsistent things that should have been caught and fixed. The writing isn't bad, but it isn't great either. An average read.
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