Friday, November 30, 2007

Mystery Book Review: UltraViolet by Nancy Bush

Mysterious ReviewsMysterious Reviews, mysteries reviewed by the Hidden Staircase Mystery Books, has written a review of UltraViolet by Nancy Bush. For our blog readers, we are printing it first here in advance of its publication on our website.UltraViolet by Nancy Bush

UltraViolet by Nancy Bush
A Jane Kelly Mystery

Kensington Books (Hardcover)
ISBN-10: 0-7582-0909-6 (0758209096)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7582-0909-2 (9780758209092)
Publication Date: October 2007
List Price: $19.95

Synopsis (from the publisher): For process server-turned-private investigator, Jane Kelly, weddings are murder. Usually that’s a metaphor, but for newly minted P.I. Jane Kelly, it’s fast becoming an all-too-accurate nightmare. Roland Hatchmere, plastic surgery magnate, has been found murdered just before his daughter’s society wedding. The weapon is a wedding gift: a heavy, silver serving tray. The prime suspect is Roland’s ex-wife #2: Violet “Ultraviolet” Purcell, she of the eccentric-bordering-on-insane Purcell clan.

Violet insists that she’s completely innocent. After all, Roland was her absolute favorite ex-husband. And she was nowhere NEAR him at the time of the murder. Well, okay, technically she did meet him for a little pre-nup, bedroom tête-à-tête just before. And they did have a huge fight. And she did hit him with the tray. But just once. Honest. So could Jane just hurry up and prove her innocence? Sure. That should be easy. Let’s just file this one under “12 Kinds of Crazy.” But when Jane’s boss, the temporarily sidelined Dwayne, is convinced Violet’s telling the truth, well, there’s nothing for Jane to do but take her lovable, misfit pug, Binky, and sniff out a few clues.

Everywhere Jane and The Binkster look, there’s a suspect odder than the last, including two grown, very troubled kids, an ex-wife strung out on Botox and a current wife who’s a cross between Donna Reed and a sex kitten—all of them eager to blame Roland’s death on Violet. It doesn’t help that Violet’s story keeps changing faster than a celebrity’s hair extensions. To make matters worse, Dwayne’s convalescence is turning him into Jimmy Stewart in “Rear Window,” complete with binoculars, and he’s convinced there is something very bad going down in the private houses across Lakewood Bay, something that needs Jane and Binky’s close attention. Faster than she can say, “I took criminology courses for this?”, Jane is up to her eyeballs in lies, secrets, Extreme Botox, New Wave bands, truck-stop coffee kiosks (don’t ask), very good scones, Junior League, wedding bandits, high school sociopaths, Plastic Pet Cemetery (don’t ask, part II), a budding attraction to her boss, the Millionaire’s Club, and someone who would kill to keep the past buried.

The deeper Jane digs, the less she wants to know. Every truth leads her deeper into danger, and soon, Jane wonders if her first official case might also be her last…and if the client she’s been asked to clear just might be the coldest black widow of all …

Review: Jane Kelly gets involved in all sorts of mayhem in Nancy Bush's breezy third mystery featuring the Oregon private investigator, UltraViolet.

Jane's primary case has her investigating whether Violet Purcell, the "UltraViolet" in the book's title, murdered her ex-husband and if she did not, who did. The murder weapon: a silver serving tray that was a gift to her daughter who just happened to be getting married on the fateful day. Violet doesn't deny hitting him with the tray during an argument though she insists he was alive and well when she left. Most of the wedding guests are potential suspects leaving Jane to determine who had the greatest motive to murder the father of the bride.

UltraViolet is certainly entertaining but, at well over 350 pages, it is far too long. Part of the problem here is an astonishing amount of repetition of facts. In the first chapter, for example, the reader is informed no less than 10 times that Jane's employer Dwayne has had an accident and his broken leg is in a cast. Unless the author is concerned about readers skimming through the pages, it's unnecessary to be so repetitive. Having Dwayne be a semi-invalid, however, allows Bush to fill more space in the book by introducing a second Hitchcockian plot involving mysterious happenings across the bay. In some ways, and probably ironically, this subplot is more interesting than the whodunit at the wedding.

Despite Jane's nearly constant activity (she seems to burn more calories in a day than most people do in a week), the author keeps the story briskly moving forward. Bush is adept at misdirection and as the number of suspects dwindles in the waning pages, it's still something of a surprise to find out who killed Violet's ex. And that's probably the most important part of a mystery, to keep the reader guessing until the very end.

Special thanks to Nancy Berland Public Relations for providing an ARC of UltraViolet for this review.

Review Copyright © 2007 — Hidden Staircase Mystery Books — All Rights Reserved.

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