To the curb!

Someone loaned me a book recently, a cozy mystery, and it was like the second in a very long series that I believe is still being published, so I guess it’s doing well, but…

The series is set somewhere the writer has possibly visited as a tourist but never lived. This is a dicey proposition if it’s a place that people know really well and the writer gets important details wrong.

However, I, too, have never lived there, so I didn’t catch most of the inaccuracies, but I read reviews, and OUCH!

The reason that I probably won’t read any others in the series has much more to do with I COULD NOT STAND the romantic interest of the amateur sleuth who is the center of the series. Through the entire book, I couldn’t wait until she kicked him to the curb. I couldn’t see any other outcome based on the way he was written.

And then–the couple at least pseudo-reconciled at the end, and readers were apparently supposed to be happy about this and think love won out. Nope. Dumb won out.

When I evaluate characters, one of my tests is, Would I be friends with her/him? I would be friends with a wide range of funny, smart, sensitive, moderately boring, aggravating, villainous, rakish, shallow, and certainly very-different-from-me characters. But I didn’t like her well enough to wait a few more books for her to dump that loser. I couldn’t understand what his appeal was to her on any level.

SO…won’t be investing any money or time in that series.

Speaking of curbs and reading, this is a new addition in the area of Houston’s Mini Murals. I actually saw the artist when he was painting it, but there isn’t parking near the busy intersection where it’s located, so I could never stop. Tom dropped me off and picked me up so I could shoot the finished mural.

1. Remember when literacy was important in the White House?

2. If I had been able to stop and meet the artist when he was painting, I’d have corrected what should be singular possessive apostrophes in the last photo. Also, the quotation is opened but not closed. Still, I like the softness of his colors, and I think he captured her well.

3. I donated that cozy mystery to a Little Free Library, so maybe someone else will read it, like it, and buy the whole series.