I’m not sure how I ended up with Spying in High Heels on Amazon on my Kindle. I’d thought it was a library borrow but then realized it couldn’t be, so I’m thinking it was probably a Kindle Daily Deal that I bought for maybe .99 cents or a $1.99 and I’m thankful that’s all I spent on this book.
You see, I’m thinking at some point, someone must have published a handbook to “How to Write a ‘Cozy’ Mystery” and it went something like this:
- Create heroine who has a career with a shtick (e.g., chef, baker, fashion designer) that has nothing to do with mysteries
- Put her into a situation where she’s forced to solve a mystery to help out someone close to her
- Add long-time best friend
- Add Mom who is slightly off-kilter
- Add sexy potential love interest who is somehow connected to law enforcement (e.g., cop, DA, bounty hunter)
- Get published
Because honestly, for most of this book, I felt as if I was reading the first Stephanie Plum novel or the first Cupcake Mystery novel and maybe if the main character’s shtick was something in which I was more interested (e.g., cooking or baking) or if she’d been a Jersey girl, I’d have cared more but that wasn’t the case. She lives in LA (Los Angeles, not Louisiana which might have made it more interesting), and she’s into fashion – two things I could care less about (and yes, by the way, we all know people in LA pride themselves on identifying driving around by their road numbers and sitting in lots of traffic but even that shtick got old quick). I guess the most surprising thing about this book is it’s the first in a series of at least nine!
So trust me, skip this one and if you still haven’t read Stephanie Plum books, go buy One for the Money. It’s not the best in the series (personally I think it takes until about book four to really get going), but they’re much more fun!