So the premise is, our heroine takes over an estate sale business when her parents retire, and then oo la la a potential client turns out to be a brothel, should she take the gig? The naughtiness of the very thought! Frissons! Palpitations!
This is nominally a rom com and kinda gestures towards cozy mystery, but it doesn’t do either convincingly. I very much should have DNFed this, but I was in a writing group where we had to report in “what I’ve been reading” every week so I plugged away. Some of the paragraph-level writing is skillful — if you tell me you’ve read another book by this author and it was fun, I will believe you — but this book does not go anywhere. Things happen, I guess, if you want to get technical about it. But it’s like walking Barbies around a Barbie village, I can see that Barbie is not in charge of where she goes, and when you finally mash Barbie & Ken together on the mouth parts it is just … who cares. Also “Ken” is a cop AND a stuffed shirt AND I didn’t go back and check (I do not care to revisit this) but I think they date for like 2-3 months and then get married? It really is like a precocious ten-year-old wrote it, all the way down to being impressed with her own naughtiness in including Women Of The Night in a House where they Entertain Gentlemen.
One star for individual paragraphs being fine to good, and one more star for not being actively malicious or anything … the only wrong it did me was stealing hours off this one precious fragile life.
CBR18 Bingo: left, because she was left the estate sale business and also the whole thing left me cold
