Love, love, love Mercy Watts!  I can't wait to read the next 5 books of this series!  This book was laugh out loud hilarious!

"Well, if it isn't Mercy Watts."

It’s summer in St. Louis and Mercy Watts is on vacation from her parents. The great detective and his nosy wife are on a cruise and Mercy thinks she’s off the hook for doing any investigating for them. But when a family friend has a fatal heart attack, Dad has one of his famous feelings and orders Mercy to look into it. Mercy's a nurse, not a detective but she’s her father’s daughter and just can't help herself from doing a little detective work of her own instead of leaving it to her cousin. Soon Gavin’s death leads to a more grisly one, the death of a bride on her wedding day. Can the two be connected? Was Gavin murdered? Now Mercy can’t stop. You do for family. That’s all there is to it.

"I've heard about... You know you look just like... Marilyn Monroe," he said.
     "Mercy Watts," I said, "How are you today?"
"Fine, fine. I guess you hear that a lot."
     "Occasionally." Also known as every freaking day.

The mystery intrigued me, the characters were funny, quirky and believable, and I loved that Mercy Watts and her mother look just like Marilyn Monroe (only natural blondes with real boobs).  The story-line about their Marilyn Monroe likeness was just a mysterious and adds to a fun plot-line to the book. 

I decided the overall writing was not worth it to continue the series. This book needs a copy editor to proof the story and fill in missing words. But it was the characters (most of them recurring) that I just could not deal with.

Mercy Watts is a great nurse and if the author focused the mystery using her medical knowledge, it would be a much better series. At that is what the story did in the beginning. But Mercy is an awful character and the biggest pet peeve I have about her character is that she is completely weak - mind, body, and emotionally. Her family/friends are abusive and she just keeps taking the abuse. She also doesn't have much deductive reasoning, making her a lousy detective despite having family members on the force and therefore (in cozy mystery land) the best amateur detective EVER (they are not all that smart either, regular group of Keystone Kops).

The characters fall into two groups: rich, pretty people and morbidly obese poor people. No depth whatsoever. The series is based in St Louis; I know this because in chapter twenty-two or so St. Louis is mentioned. Up to that point, I thought this might have taken place in any big city in the Mid-West (Chicago, Omaha, etc). That is how little the setting matters to the story or the author.

The mystery was sub-par and muddied by the constant crappy characterizations. 1 star.

when you are reading and the MC has so many quirks and judgments (harsh, assertive judgments) that it is not really the MC's character traits but the author's likes/dislikes/opinions/preferences that are coming through? I mean loudly and assertively coming through. I don't know if I can get through another 132 pages of this MC's constant harping on her preferences/dislikes - at this point I am wondering if I will get a mystery at all between the BS characterizations (see previous post about same book) and now the constant quirks of the author MC.

I started this book because I forgot the book I was reading at home and needed something to keep me occupied while waiting on the laundry.

Goal for the next two days is to finish this story up and decide if I want to continue with the other two novellas I have on the TBR or cut my losses and just delete those books off the NOOK.

This book started with such promise, but the characterizations fall into two categories: sexy, glamorous Marilyn-Monroe/Golden Age of Hollywood or morbidly obese sexually-harassing. Oh, and the police is a parody of the likes of Keystone Kops.

And for the love of all that is reading, repeat after me cozy mystery writers: "Just because my daddy was a detective/investigator, doesn't mean I am a detective or should be investigating a death."