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A review by tracey_stewart
Cruel Winter by Sheila Connolly
1.0
I'm not sure how I ended up with only book five of the County Cork Mysteries - some sale or other on Audible, I suppose. It filtered near the top of my search list when I was looking for my next book, so I gave it a shot.
Thank God that's over.
I mean, it's an interesting idea. A bunch of people get stuck in an Irish bar and solve a murder. It doesn't snow often in Ireland - if you don't know that at the beginning of this book, you will surely know it by the end, because you are so told, frequently. And because it doesn't snow often in Ireland, even what would be considered a moderate snowfall here in New England is crippling for County Cork. Maura, a born-and-bred Boston native who has transplanted to Ireland in a manner which is also related frequently, has no idea what to do to prepare the bar she has found herself owning. How do I know this? I know because she asks her main employee what she should do about eleven times, and after they've exhausted the subject (I was exhausted after the second time, but they kept on going) he sends her across the street to ask the owner of the inn there. And so she somehow manages to ask that woman eight times. (I was not counting. It may have only been three or four times, but it felt like about eighty, so I picked a number in between.) Oh, I forgot - the local cop (garda) swings by, and she asks him several times as well. (Towards the end of the book Maura even says "Tell me again that this kind of snow is rare around here". Don't worry - they will.)
And of course the local beat cop is enamored with her - as, apparently, is one of her employees (the one that isn't a thieving, skiving father of a teenager). Because of course they are. It wouldn't be a cozy(ish) mystery if the main character didn't have two men pining for her despite a marked lack of pine-for-able attributes. It's part of the cozy mystery checklist. Completely unqualified woman falls into dream job - check. Quirky side characters - check. Potential love triangle - check. One tiny point I'll give to this author - neither of the swains is, as far as I recall, described as irresistibly hot. At least not in this book. And another one - the local inspector trusts Maura's instincts, listens to "wacky theories", and places them above actual detective work.
Now, ok. As a born-and-bred native of Connecticut, I wouldn't know how to prepare an Irish bar for a snowstorm either. But this is a woman who has somehow made it to whatever blizzard-prone date this is without a coat. She says (repeatedly, because that's how this book works) that it was spring when she arrived in Ireland, and she never intended to still be there nine months later. OK. Fine. But - - well, first of all, where's all her own stuff? Has she been paying rent on an apartment back in Boston all this time? (But she's poor! She says so - several times!) Or are all her possessions in storage somewhere? Surely she owns a coat in the US that could be sent to her? Or ... something? And second of all ... Look, honey, even if it doesn't snow a whole lot, it does rain a great deal. If you don't have the brains to have gotten yourself a coat - yes, at a thrift shop or on sale somewhere or whatever - you're just a moron.
She mentions that she has always been too poor to have a cell phone. Lady, if I have been able to afford a cell phone for the past ... twenty? years, you can flaming well afford a cell phone. And if you were so astonishingly poor, how did your granny manage to send you to Ireland, just to 'say goodbye' or whatever it was? I've always been too poor to take a whimsical trip to Ireland. Which is much more expensive than a basic cell phone. Also, the main reason I had a cell phone for most of those twenty-odd years was that I had an elderly mother. With an elderly grandmother, it's just irresponsible not to have one.
Going back to the storm prep, and the repetitions. For I believe five chapters she bumbles about trying to get ready. And I mean, fine, she's a young moron who's new to the area and to running a business (and to socializing, apparently) - but shouldn't SOMEbody else have said, after seeing the weather forecast a couple of days ago, "Hey, so, snow coming - do we have oil and coal and peat (how many different combustibles are being used??) and lamp oil and candles and food (they had NO food in the place????) (None??) (Not even crisps?) and some way of accommodating anyone who might be snowed in overnight?" If not her employees, then the woman from over the street, or the elderly barfly Billy, or the attentive cop? Someone? Maybe they could have found out before the snow started falling that someone had been stealing their oil and they were almost out?
Oh, her employees. All three of Maura's employees show up, admittedly because they don't want to have to heat their own homes. So she's going to be expected to pay all three of them for this day. And yet she is apparently giving away all the beer and whisky (and coffee) anyone can drink. Oh, and the food they manage to scrape together. She sort of timidly mentions at one point that if anyone wants to chip in to, you know, actually pay for stuff, that would be cool - and there is absolutely no response, and she never asks again.
That food I mentioned? Again I ask: how did they have absolutely nothing in the bar, and yet people expect to be fed? Why would you show up at a bar which has never, apparently, served food, expecting to be fed? Anyway. That food has to be prepared in ridiculously makeshift conditions; it's as if they just walked into an abandoned pub and decided to start operations. But this is a place that was running forever and a day under previous ownership, and of which Maura apparently gained possession nine months ago. In all that time - the nine months, at least, if not the previous forever - she never did a damn thing to clean the place up, make the kitchen usable for staff if nothing else, never did anything about the hoarder's paradise upstairs and in the basement? Nine months you've been there. What on earth have you been doing? "Right now, I need sleep - even if it's on that dirty floor." Lady, it's your bar. If the floor's dirty, that's on you.
The writing isn't bad, but there are many, many issues with this book that could have been resolved with a decent editor. I don't know if that would be enough to salvage it, but it would help - a good pair of eyes might at least have picked up on the repetitiveness, which was so bad by the halfway point that it was almost physically painful.
Another thing the editors should have caught: you might not want to have all your characters talking about how few, how incredibly few murders there are in Ireland, how the number of murders is so vanishingly small, when this is the fifth book in a series of mysteries - murder mysteries SET in Ireland. If one person said it, and Maura kind of gaped at them in a "but I've already been involved in four investigations this year" sort of way ... no, it would still have been absurd. "This place isn't filled with violence, like Boston" - gosh, I hope both Ireland and Massachusetts contact this author to do some tourism campaigns. Things like this were said so often that I did some Googling. For reference, based on a quick search the population of Boston (48.4 square miles) is more than 675,000. The population of County Cork (2,900 square miles) is more than 581,000. Gosh, wait - hold everything - you're telling me that there's more crime in a place with 116% the population of a place 69% larger? How bizarre! Boston - that's 7.17 people per square mile, as opposed to 0.0049 people per square mile in Cork. These people need to just shut the hell up and stop thinking they're so damn superior. AAARGH - I'm almost done with the thing, and someone has to say to Maura "Maybe you attract [events like this] like a magnet, since your country is so violent." A) That makes no sense. B) See above, regarding population density. C) Shut your stupid gob, you ignorant twat.)(Oh, and to cap it all off, we get one more Reality Show Recap. I hate this book.
And it made me do more searches. According to the Boston Herald there were 41 homicides in the city in 2022. Same year, there were 69 in the Republic of Ireland. I can't find anything for Cork specifically. So, ok, maybe you're considerably less likely to be murdered in County Cork than in Boston. HOWEVER. Keeping in mind the population densities I mentioned above, consider this: According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, the number of sexual assaults in Boston in 2022 was about 175. In County Cork? Rape and sexual assault totaled 164. Yes, as a woman, I would feel SO much safer in Ireland.
I started this in hopes of, if nothing else, much brogue, and so I was a little worried when the narrator gave the opening credits in a plain old American accent. But she handled the three main character accents - Irish, English, and Boston - credibly well. Her cadence was a touch odd in places, but it was fine. It was better than the book deserved, actually.
You'll notice in all of this I haven't even mentioned the mystery the book is supposed to feature. That is partly because for about six chapters - six long chapters - there IS no mystery. It's all storm prep. I literally double-checked the book's page on Audible to make sure it was supposed to be a mystery and not a chick-lit fish-out-of-water straight fiction novel. The mystery, when it does finally unfold, is interesting; it's an interesting set-up. It could have been a really interesting story. As written? For a murder mystery, it's a fair book about a snowstorm. Oh, Audible, no: "A clever spin on the classic locked-room mystery"? No. No, that's not how locked room mysteries work, Audible. That's false advertising.
I cut out a lot from this rant, believe it or not - it's not worth the words, and I don't want to memorialize the specific nonsense I had made notes on. Suffice to say that I want my 7 hours and 27 minutes back.
Thank God that's over.
I mean, it's an interesting idea. A bunch of people get stuck in an Irish bar and solve a murder. It doesn't snow often in Ireland - if you don't know that at the beginning of this book, you will surely know it by the end, because you are so told, frequently. And because it doesn't snow often in Ireland, even what would be considered a moderate snowfall here in New England is crippling for County Cork. Maura, a born-and-bred Boston native who has transplanted to Ireland in a manner which is also related frequently, has no idea what to do to prepare the bar she has found herself owning. How do I know this? I know because she asks her main employee what she should do about eleven times, and after they've exhausted the subject (I was exhausted after the second time, but they kept on going) he sends her across the street to ask the owner of the inn there. And so she somehow manages to ask that woman eight times. (I was not counting. It may have only been three or four times, but it felt like about eighty, so I picked a number in between.) Oh, I forgot - the local cop (garda) swings by, and she asks him several times as well. (Towards the end of the book Maura even says "Tell me again that this kind of snow is rare around here". Don't worry - they will.)
And of course the local beat cop is enamored with her - as, apparently, is one of her employees (the one that isn't a thieving, skiving father of a teenager). Because of course they are. It wouldn't be a cozy(ish) mystery if the main character didn't have two men pining for her despite a marked lack of pine-for-able attributes. It's part of the cozy mystery checklist. Completely unqualified woman falls into dream job - check. Quirky side characters - check. Potential love triangle - check. One tiny point I'll give to this author - neither of the swains is, as far as I recall, described as irresistibly hot. At least not in this book. And another one - the local inspector trusts Maura's instincts, listens to "wacky theories", and places them above actual detective work.
Now, ok. As a born-and-bred native of Connecticut, I wouldn't know how to prepare an Irish bar for a snowstorm either. But this is a woman who has somehow made it to whatever blizzard-prone date this is without a coat. She says (repeatedly, because that's how this book works) that it was spring when she arrived in Ireland, and she never intended to still be there nine months later. OK. Fine. But - - well, first of all, where's all her own stuff? Has she been paying rent on an apartment back in Boston all this time? (But she's poor! She says so - several times!) Or are all her possessions in storage somewhere? Surely she owns a coat in the US that could be sent to her? Or ... something? And second of all ... Look, honey, even if it doesn't snow a whole lot, it does rain a great deal. If you don't have the brains to have gotten yourself a coat - yes, at a thrift shop or on sale somewhere or whatever - you're just a moron.
She mentions that she has always been too poor to have a cell phone. Lady, if I have been able to afford a cell phone for the past ... twenty? years, you can flaming well afford a cell phone. And if you were so astonishingly poor, how did your granny manage to send you to Ireland, just to 'say goodbye' or whatever it was? I've always been too poor to take a whimsical trip to Ireland. Which is much more expensive than a basic cell phone. Also, the main reason I had a cell phone for most of those twenty-odd years was that I had an elderly mother. With an elderly grandmother, it's just irresponsible not to have one.
Going back to the storm prep, and the repetitions. For I believe five chapters she bumbles about trying to get ready. And I mean, fine, she's a young moron who's new to the area and to running a business (and to socializing, apparently) - but shouldn't SOMEbody else have said, after seeing the weather forecast a couple of days ago, "Hey, so, snow coming - do we have oil and coal and peat (how many different combustibles are being used??) and lamp oil and candles and food (they had NO food in the place????) (None??) (Not even crisps?) and some way of accommodating anyone who might be snowed in overnight?" If not her employees, then the woman from over the street, or the elderly barfly Billy, or the attentive cop? Someone? Maybe they could have found out before the snow started falling that someone had been stealing their oil and they were almost out?
Oh, her employees. All three of Maura's employees show up, admittedly because they don't want to have to heat their own homes. So she's going to be expected to pay all three of them for this day. And yet she is apparently giving away all the beer and whisky (and coffee) anyone can drink. Oh, and the food they manage to scrape together. She sort of timidly mentions at one point that if anyone wants to chip in to, you know, actually pay for stuff, that would be cool - and there is absolutely no response, and she never asks again.
That food I mentioned? Again I ask: how did they have absolutely nothing in the bar, and yet people expect to be fed? Why would you show up at a bar which has never, apparently, served food, expecting to be fed? Anyway. That food has to be prepared in ridiculously makeshift conditions; it's as if they just walked into an abandoned pub and decided to start operations. But this is a place that was running forever and a day under previous ownership, and of which Maura apparently gained possession nine months ago. In all that time - the nine months, at least, if not the previous forever - she never did a damn thing to clean the place up, make the kitchen usable for staff if nothing else, never did anything about the hoarder's paradise upstairs and in the basement? Nine months you've been there. What on earth have you been doing? "Right now, I need sleep - even if it's on that dirty floor." Lady, it's your bar. If the floor's dirty, that's on you.
The writing isn't bad, but there are many, many issues with this book that could have been resolved with a decent editor. I don't know if that would be enough to salvage it, but it would help - a good pair of eyes might at least have picked up on the repetitiveness, which was so bad by the halfway point that it was almost physically painful.
Another thing the editors should have caught: you might not want to have all your characters talking about how few, how incredibly few murders there are in Ireland, how the number of murders is so vanishingly small, when this is the fifth book in a series of mysteries - murder mysteries SET in Ireland. If one person said it, and Maura kind of gaped at them in a "but I've already been involved in four investigations this year" sort of way ... no, it would still have been absurd. "This place isn't filled with violence, like Boston" - gosh, I hope both Ireland and Massachusetts contact this author to do some tourism campaigns. Things like this were said so often that I did some Googling. For reference, based on a quick search the population of Boston (48.4 square miles) is more than 675,000. The population of County Cork (2,900 square miles) is more than 581,000. Gosh, wait - hold everything - you're telling me that there's more crime in a place with 116% the population of a place 69% larger? How bizarre! Boston - that's 7.17 people per square mile, as opposed to 0.0049 people per square mile in Cork. These people need to just shut the hell up and stop thinking they're so damn superior. AAARGH - I'm almost done with the thing, and someone has to say to Maura "Maybe you attract [events like this] like a magnet, since your country is so violent." A) That makes no sense. B) See above, regarding population density. C) Shut your stupid gob, you ignorant twat.)(Oh, and to cap it all off, we get one more Reality Show Recap. I hate this book.
And it made me do more searches. According to the Boston Herald there were 41 homicides in the city in 2022. Same year, there were 69 in the Republic of Ireland. I can't find anything for Cork specifically. So, ok, maybe you're considerably less likely to be murdered in County Cork than in Boston. HOWEVER. Keeping in mind the population densities I mentioned above, consider this: According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, the number of sexual assaults in Boston in 2022 was about 175. In County Cork? Rape and sexual assault totaled 164. Yes, as a woman, I would feel SO much safer in Ireland.
I started this in hopes of, if nothing else, much brogue, and so I was a little worried when the narrator gave the opening credits in a plain old American accent. But she handled the three main character accents - Irish, English, and Boston - credibly well. Her cadence was a touch odd in places, but it was fine. It was better than the book deserved, actually.
You'll notice in all of this I haven't even mentioned the mystery the book is supposed to feature. That is partly because for about six chapters - six long chapters - there IS no mystery. It's all storm prep. I literally double-checked the book's page on Audible to make sure it was supposed to be a mystery and not a chick-lit fish-out-of-water straight fiction novel. The mystery, when it does finally unfold, is interesting; it's an interesting set-up. It could have been a really interesting story. As written? For a murder mystery, it's a fair book about a snowstorm. Oh, Audible, no: "A clever spin on the classic locked-room mystery"? No. No, that's not how locked room mysteries work, Audible. That's false advertising.
I cut out a lot from this rant, believe it or not - it's not worth the words, and I don't want to memorialize the specific nonsense I had made notes on. Suffice to say that I want my 7 hours and 27 minutes back.