Book: Out on a Limb

With an endorsement on the front cover from Elizabeth Peters, and another on the back that said, “She’s hilarious . . .” I had hopes for this mystery novel. After reading it, however, I have to rate it a 3 out of 5. I do find some of the characters engaging and interesting, but the story is scattered, the mystery is a bit weak, and the jokes fall short of hilarious for me.

The strong female lead is diminished, in my view, by her weak and apparently inept boyfriend, a police Lieutenant who can’t seem to see fairly obvious things. At one point when the lead (Claire Malloy) is making an excuse for not telling him something that she really should have as a good citizen, she notes that the police have much greater resources than she has, and that a little simple police work would have produced the result. She’s right, it probably would have, thus indicating that the police work wasn’t done. It seems that Malloy wins not through intelligence or hard work, but rather through a combination of fortuitous information and police laziness or ineptness.

Interesting characters might get me to pick up another book in this series. The story in this one will stand against that. We’ll have to see what happens.