Southern Fried

I'm really glad to have been lead to this series, even if I did start with the newest book instead of the first. I've enjoyed reading them so much that I've had to force myself to stop reading them to go to bed or work and I now regret not taking at least the next one out from the library so I could get started reading it right now.

In this introduction to the series, the characters and town felt just as natural as the last installment instead of forced as many first books in a series can.
Which makes it even more impressive that this is in fact her first book.

With one exception the people of this town feel real and fleshed out, and she captures the feel of a small town and what it might be like to come home wonderfully. The only show more exception is when she tries to demonstrate one of the deputies Southern accent in typed form, it just feels force and makes him more of a caricature. At some point she stops that though, since he wasn't like that in the newest book.

The actual mysteries and surrounding story lines were handled quite well, though I did find some of them a bit convenient in the end. But the endings all made such good sense and felt right that I don't even consider that a sticking point.

And again as in the first one I read, I appreciated that the mysteries didn't get solved solely by our intrepid investigator but progressed naturally and made sense. show less

An okay cozy mystery about disgraced attorney Avery Andrews who comes back home and falls into town doings. Her office will be in an old mortuary. The series may prove interesting, but the plotting is a bit weak in thie first installment.

Loved the look of this book, but never really got into it. Liked the main character but didn't connect with any of the others. Plot was interesting with some fun twists.

I read this because it was pick of the month for one of my online reading group and because the protagonist is a lawyer. It was okay for a cozy mystery, but just okay. I kept getting distracted by the author writing out how the people in the small South Carolina talked rather than letting me imagine it; if I have to decipher the language, it makes the page-turning a bit slower. More importantly, I was never convinced about what mystery the main character was trying to solve, or even if she was trying to do anything at all. I might continue with the series if someone told me the writing improves, but probably not otherwise.

I wasn't expecting much from this book as I was looking for something light and fluffy to read, if you can define a murder mystery as light and fluffy that is, even so I was disappointed with this book. The opening few paragraphs implied that this might be a southern counterpart to the Stephanie Plum series, but its not to be. I found the characters to be interchangeable and very formulaically two dimensional, the mystery predictable and suspect that I won't remember this book at all in a couple of days..