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med_librarian 's review for:
Death of a Poison Pen
by M.C. Beaton
Usual M.C. Beaton fare. Easy, quick read. The mystery is slight.
The problem I have with these is that they're like Twinkies. Easy enough to gobble down, pleasant enough, but ultimately never that satisfying. I was trying to pin down why--after all I don't need every mystery I read to be of Dorothy Sayers or Ngaio Marsh quality--and I finally settled on the narrative style. Beaton uses the POV structure. She paints these interesting petty little characters, but when she tries to slip into their persona, it's all very surface, but the touch is never that deft or convincing. Jenny is determined to go to Scotland, apparently with the aim of bagging her friend, Priscilla's boyfriend, Hamish Macbeth,but it's never very clear why. And as Beaton switches from character to character, the mystery of what makes Jenny tick is never really solved. It seems to me that rather from switching through half a dozen perspectives, it would have been a stronger book if Beaton had either done third person omniscient or let us see Lochdubh, Macbeth, and the other characters through one character's eyes.
The problem I have with these is that they're like Twinkies. Easy enough to gobble down, pleasant enough, but ultimately never that satisfying. I was trying to pin down why--after all I don't need every mystery I read to be of Dorothy Sayers or Ngaio Marsh quality--and I finally settled on the narrative style. Beaton uses the POV structure. She paints these interesting petty little characters, but when she tries to slip into their persona, it's all very surface, but the touch is never that deft or convincing. Jenny is determined to go to Scotland, apparently with the aim of bagging her friend, Priscilla's boyfriend, Hamish Macbeth,but it's never very clear why. And as Beaton switches from character to character, the mystery of what makes Jenny tick is never really solved. It seems to me that rather from switching through half a dozen perspectives, it would have been a stronger book if Beaton had either done third person omniscient or let us see Lochdubh, Macbeth, and the other characters through one character's eyes.