Another okay entry in the Jocelyn O’Roarke Mysteries. At six books, this isn’t a long series as cozies go, but I feel like Dentinger was already out of ideas at this point. Several key plot points are super easy to spot early on, murderer and motive included, and the only plus is that Jack the Aggressively Heterosexual Hairdresser is absent. There are a lot of deliberate callbacks to book three as Josh and Phil try to confront the hows and whys of their relationship going pear-shaped, and that I can understand and accept. But there are also some unintentional parallels and re-used elements that I’m not impressed by. I guess there are only so many ways you can spin the whole murder-in-the-theater-community shtick, but this is the second time the MacGuffin has been in the deceased’s makeup case, and it's super obvious that’s where Dentinger's going as soon as the case shows up.

And while it’s kind of heartening to know Dentinger was out there in the mid-90s writing a heroine who’d had an abortion, I can’t help feeling it was sloppily done in a very ham-fisted way. I can’t remember Josh’s pro-choice stance ever coming up before (doesn’t mean it didn’t come up, mind you, what with my memory being so closely related to Swiss cheese), so when she’s suddenly flying to Washington DC for the March for Women’s Lives, I knew it was time to kiss nuance goodbye.

There’s one book left in the series, which I’ll be reading just to see how things shake out between Josh and Phil. If this book is any indication, the mystery isn’t going to be particularly mystifying. I just hope there are fewer typos, because ye gods! If anyone needs some extra commas, this book has got them in the weirdest places.

(Read for Halloween Bingo Amateur Sleuth Square)

It’s been a while since I last hung out with Jocelyn and Phillip. All is not well in their relationship. The so-perfect-for-each-other-it’s-disgusting couple has split due to a difference of opinion: Phillip wants to put a ring on it and Jocelyn is allergic to marriage. The Specter of Unresolved Feelings haunts the entire book. The mystery is a bit weak and I hated the ending, but it still gets an average rating because at least I cared enough about the characters to be really angry at the stupid, prideful boneheads.

One thing I hope never to see again: Dentinger attempting to write a black man’s dialogue in a tortured approximation of 1980’s AAVE. Thank goodness it was only in one scene.

One thing I hope to see more of: Government fart-finding missions.

They had eight pages of heavy exposition to get through, and they got through it as if they were on a government fart-finding mission.

The quote above is in reference to a pair of nervous actors in an off-Broadway play getting through their lines in their first scene of opening night. Bolding mine. I’d like the opinions of others on whether “fart-finding” is a typo or deliberate. XD

Since the dawn of time we’ve recognized the most effective way to solve difficult issues is by face-to-face discussion; enabling an environment which harnesses creativity and allows ideas to flourish.

Jocelyn Lomer General Manager of nuVa Enterprises states: “With the same understanding, 21st century experts designed nuVa to create an experience of equal value.”

A shrinking global workspace means colleagues and project stakeholders are often many miles apart, sharing expert knowledge over different continents, cultures and time-zones.

To see the full picture we need to talk face-to-face and nuVa by cereno actually puts you in the same room regardless of where you are in the world. Creating an immersive and fully engaging workspace, nuVa is specifically designed to emulate a live meeting environment, allowing users to simultaneously share multiple documents and collaborate in the most natural way possible

With its roots in the defence industry, nuVa is based upon ground breaking psychological research conducted by some of the world’s top academic institutions and was conceived to enable immediate and informed decision making, remotely between global locations.

Quite simply, nuVa is the world’s leading remote meeting experience which emulates a real meeting in the best possible way. If you’re managing complex projects over global locations with multiple participants, then can you afford to not pay nuVa the attention it deserves?

Everyone around Harriet — from Harriet’s family down to the stage manager — has a motive to murder, if given the right opportunity.