Scan barcode
A review by gavgaddis
Primer and Punishment: A House-Flipper Mystery by Diane Kelly
lighthearted
relaxing
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
1.5
An excellent example of a book where the audiobook narrator does more heavy lifting to get you enjoying the story than the actual author.
I picked this paperback up off a B&N shelf as a lark, something easy to read on a small work vacation. Perhaps a cozy mystery with a person who has poor personal ethics (given the whole point is the sleuth is a house flipper) would be a fun wrinkle to add to a formula-based genre.
A core premise of cozy mysteries is the concept that proper law enforcement are inept. One would argue it's also the most realistic cornerstone, har har easy joke. Unfortunately, Diane Kelly is the kind of woman who proudly brags about having completed a citizen's police academy.
There's no sugarcoating it: the author and the main character are weirdly fetishistic about law enforcement. To a bootlicking degree. I picked this up under the impression it was the second or, at most, third book in a series about house flippers who keep stumbling into mysteries. Something that would require a modicum of self-awareness and humor to smooth over an inherent plot premise that would start to raise suspicion after the second instance. Twice is coincidence, thrice is a pattern. At one point Whitney effectively breaks the fourth wall to lecture the audience on a Tennessee law that says children accused of murder can be tried as adults. Whitney, our moral compass and protagonist, tries to "both sides" the issue by saying families of victims are happy murderers are kept behind bars, but "civil rights activists argue-"
Sorry, both Whitney and Diane. If your second half of "both sides" starts with the words "civil rights activists" the first half of the argument is invalid. At best the politics of Whitney are centrist.
This is the FIFTH book. The protagonist is dating a cop. Her cohort is getting married. We are clearly running out of steam for things to do and say in mysteries regarding house flipping.
The mystery is bland. The red herrings are obvious and you can easily guess how many chapters they're going to eat up. The finale involves a "high speed" boat chase on a lake which gets the blood pumping as much as a stoplight changing green slightly faster than anticipated.
Also, I'm not quite sure while Kelly set this in Nashville. Perhaps she simply ran out of Nashville world-building in the first four books or what, but this reads like someone who has been to Nashville three times on vacation trying to write a book about people who live in the Nashville metropolitan area. There's a mind-numbing moment in the opening where Whitney drives from the vague location outside Nashville she lives at to the lake the majority of the book takes place on, and Kelly gives directions down to which highway one would need to take to get there.
Which is to say: it reeks of the author loading up Google Maps and plotting out the course because she's not particularly done it. Like how high school students really stress details they learned in the Spark Notes to try and make it seem like they read the full thing. I don't see why this book couldn't have been set in the author's home state of North Carolina and operated exactly the same, save for a few very specific details regarding TN laws that seem to only be relevant in the fifth book.
I will fully accept that it's on me for starting a book series on the fifth entry, save for one thing: cozy mysteries are designed to be formulaic and episodic.
Excusing all of that, from the cop-worship to unnecessarily setting the book in Nashville, my main issue with Primer and Punishment is we're five books deep and Kelly still is just throwing loose ingredients in the bowl. There are so many subplots in this that have NOTHING to do with the rest of the subplots.
They're renovating a houseboat. It's the core premise of the story that gets her involved in the murder investigation. Guess what: the houseboat is used zero times in the apprehension.
Whitney teases a bachelorette party. You might think "oh, clearly what's going to happen is something interrupts the party and they have to use the boat in some way to trail the killer, or chase someone down with a rickety houseboat for a action-packed finale."
I picked this paperback up off a B&N shelf as a lark, something easy to read on a small work vacation. Perhaps a cozy mystery with a person who has poor personal ethics (given the whole point is the sleuth is a house flipper) would be a fun wrinkle to add to a formula-based genre.
A core premise of cozy mysteries is the concept that proper law enforcement are inept. One would argue it's also the most realistic cornerstone, har har easy joke. Unfortunately, Diane Kelly is the kind of woman who proudly brags about having completed a citizen's police academy.
There's no sugarcoating it: the author and the main character are weirdly fetishistic about law enforcement. To a bootlicking degree. I picked this up under the impression it was the second or, at most, third book in a series about house flippers who keep stumbling into mysteries. Something that would require a modicum of self-awareness and humor to smooth over an inherent plot premise that would start to raise suspicion after the second instance. Twice is coincidence, thrice is a pattern. At one point Whitney effectively breaks the fourth wall to lecture the audience on a Tennessee law that says children accused of murder can be tried as adults. Whitney, our moral compass and protagonist, tries to "both sides" the issue by saying families of victims are happy murderers are kept behind bars, but "civil rights activists argue-"
Sorry, both Whitney and Diane. If your second half of "both sides" starts with the words "civil rights activists" the first half of the argument is invalid. At best the politics of Whitney are centrist.
This is the FIFTH book. The protagonist is dating a cop. Her cohort is getting married. We are clearly running out of steam for things to do and say in mysteries regarding house flipping.
The mystery is bland. The red herrings are obvious and you can easily guess how many chapters they're going to eat up. The finale involves a "high speed" boat chase on a lake which gets the blood pumping as much as a stoplight changing green slightly faster than anticipated.
Also, I'm not quite sure while Kelly set this in Nashville. Perhaps she simply ran out of Nashville world-building in the first four books or what, but this reads like someone who has been to Nashville three times on vacation trying to write a book about people who live in the Nashville metropolitan area. There's a mind-numbing moment in the opening where Whitney drives from the vague location outside Nashville she lives at to the lake the majority of the book takes place on, and Kelly gives directions down to which highway one would need to take to get there.
Which is to say: it reeks of the author loading up Google Maps and plotting out the course because she's not particularly done it. Like how high school students really stress details they learned in the Spark Notes to try and make it seem like they read the full thing. I don't see why this book couldn't have been set in the author's home state of North Carolina and operated exactly the same, save for a few very specific details regarding TN laws that seem to only be relevant in the fifth book.
I will fully accept that it's on me for starting a book series on the fifth entry, save for one thing: cozy mysteries are designed to be formulaic and episodic.
Excusing all of that, from the cop-worship to unnecessarily setting the book in Nashville, my main issue with Primer and Punishment is we're five books deep and Kelly still is just throwing loose ingredients in the bowl. There are so many subplots in this that have NOTHING to do with the rest of the subplots.
Whitney teases a bachelorette party. You might think "oh, clearly what's going to happen is something interrupts the party and they have to use the boat in some way to trail the killer, or chase someone down with a rickety houseboat for a action-packed finale."
Content Warnings
Minor: Racism
There is exactly one character who isn't white or their skin isn't given a color description and thus assumed white. He's a Black character who seems shifty at first and the protagonist is oddly more worried about violence from confronting him than most people in the book. He's a red herring, but until that reveal it's really shifty.
She does capitalize the B in Black, but that could be the work of an editor and not a sign the author is aware of her biases enough to bother even doing that.