Nancy S. (avidbookcollector) - , reviewed on 12/31/2009 + 36 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 1

A Good Weekend for Murder is the first installment in a series featuring Barry Vaughan, a history teacher and British crime fiction writer, and his wife, Dee. The story centers around another crime novelist, Charles Wild, who has managed to make enough enemies, all with reasons to kill him. He is murdered at his lavish country house, but with so many suspects, the police are going to have a very difficult time making sense of it all. Enter the Vaughans, who have also been invited to the party and who take up amateur sleuthing in an effort to get to the bottom of the murder.

Up until the murder, the story is quite good, largely because Charles Wild is such a great bad guy and the author spends a lot of time setting the scene for him to be a person most likely to die because of his nasty personality. But once the murder occurs and the police step in, it's like the author kind of ran out steam and couldn't figure out where the story was going. The Vaughans, as a detective duo who reconjure themselves as Nick and Nora Charles, aren't so great as characters, but the real problem is the plotting and the pacing. The end comes as a rush, and it seemed that the announcement of the killer was more of an afterthought than the purpose of the mystery. I'm willing to let this slide and go on to the next in the series because it's a series opener, but hard-core mystery readers may be a bit disappointed overall.

I'd recommend it with caution, because it's a bit unsatisfying. The unraveling of the murder plot is a bit ho-hum and I'd probably guess that it's more oriented to cozy readers rather than more serious mystery readers like myself.

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