This came through my email yesterday and I thought I'd pass it along to my USA friends who might be interested.  Henery Press produces some great cozy mysteries.  Of this batch I can recommend highly Board Stiff - Kendel Lynn, Swan Dive - Kendel Lynn    and The Semester of Our Discontent - Cynthia Kuhn.  

 

From the email:

Dollycas’s Thoughts

Ellison Russell’s day was pretty normal until she drops her fancy lipstick under the bleachers at a football game. After that hold on tight because you won’t be able to put this book down.

Like the first story in the series, The Deep End, it takes place in 1974. Again Ellison’s mom, part of the Country Club set, is not happy with the way her daughter is living her life. I love that Ellison is getting stronger. It seems the trip to Europe after her husband’s death really helped her. She is not letting her mother totally take over but her mother is hard at work trying to find her a new husband. All of their conversations are wonderful and a few will have you cheering and laughing out loud.

Trying to live a normal life just isn’t in the cards for Ellison after she finds a injured student. His last words before he died, “Tell her I love her.” That is all Ellison wants to do but she keeps finding herself drawn into the investigation. It doesn’t help her daughter has known the young man almost all her life and is now grieving him as well as her father. Homicide Detective Anarchey Jones isn’t happy about Ellison’s involvement but she seems to be able to reach people he can’t – like Alice Standish, a young girl that is crazy in love and just plain crazy. She gave me shivers.

Julie Mulhern has a gift for creating lifelike 3 dimension characters that almost leap off the pages. It would be hard to choose a favorite. She has a way of drawing you into their story that makes the real world just fall away. I started reading this late at night thinking I would just read a chapter or two and the next thing I knew I was at the end and the sun would be rising soon. She made me laugh, she made me cry, she made me remember life in the 70’s when I was just a teenager. I would have been a high school freshman when this story took place. While none of my friends were murdered we did lose a few so the words and the actions of the teens were very genuine to me.

There was also a very important story within the story. I was so impressed by the was it was written, the way Ellison handled the situation, and blended into the main plot seamlessly.

An excellent read! I think we have just scratched the surface of Ellison Russell. I am anxious for the next installment.

4 stars!  GUARANTEED TO BLEED  @HeneryPress  @JulieKMulhern
There were a lot of strange and creepy characters running around in this book. I didn't like that Hess guy from the beginning. And that Quin dude? Her mother sets Ellison up with him? Ewwww!!!

I found this book to be funny, quirky, suspenseful, heartbreaking and just down right sad.

The characters and the story were very well developed and I enjoyed reading the book with the exception of the subject matter of why Donna ran away. It's terrible that that kind of stuff happens. The mother did the right thing and I think that extreme measures should be taken to insure that it doesn't happen. But don't let that throw you off this book. It's just a personal matter to me. I truly did enjoy reading the book and was very entertained and would recommend it to everyone.

Huge thanks to Henery Press and Net Galley for the free e-galley in exchange for an honest review!

 

Lesson learned—when making major life changes, don’t start with red lipstick.

I enjoyed the first book of this series so I was eager to read more about Ellison. To me Ellison is a likeable and relatable character (I especially enjoy her sense of humor) and it was just as interesting reading about her in this book as the first in the series. Ellison is back in this book from a European vacation with Grace and she finds herself back to finding dead bodies. Well to be fair she finds Bobby Lowell who is dying, so technically not dead, and he leaves her with a message to pass on to a mystery girl. Ellison makes it her mission to track down whoever that girl may be and let her know what Bobby said. This will once again lead her in the middle of a murder investigation.

 

I could read this series purely for Ellison's sense of humor and getting to read about her scary yet fierce mother. I am sad to say that in this book Ellison's daughter, Grace, was extremely annoying, almost to the point of ruining the book for me. I liked Grace in the first book but I could only take her whole whiny teenage girl routine for so long. There were times when I felt Ellison needed to slap some sense into her. I couldn't her enough of Hunter and Anarchy and really wish that Ellison would stop trying to avoid their attention.

 

The plot progressed nicely throughout the book pretty much until the end of the book. The ending felt like the book kind of just fizzled out. Something happens at the end that pretty much had nothing to do with the mystery and then the story wraps up a bit weakly. In regards to the mystery itself I suppose it wouldn't be all that hard to figure it out but I think the real mystery is why everything happened. 

 

This was overall a solid sequel to the first in the series. I am really looking forward to reading more of this series. Thanks to Netgalley and Henery Press for the galley.