I'm going to start with some of my favorite passages from the book. Just so I can remember the potential.
"All relationships are real," said Tuesday. "Friendship can be as deep as the ocean. It's all a kind of love, and love isn't any one kind of thing."
"This was self-medicating drunk, this was it fucking hurts drunk, this was the only way I know how to survive being alive right now is legal poison in my body drunk." -- This line really hit me. I've been that kind of drunk more time than is probably healthy for a person.
"Jesus, he is charming," Dex said to Tuesday. "Charming like a psychopath. Are we sure he's not going to murder us down here?" He paused. "That's a legitimately horrifying thought. Please don't do that to us, Mr. Arches. I haven't drunk half of what I intend to before I die." -----This is one of the many, many reasons Dex was my favorite character.
On with it.
I stayed up way past my bedtime to finish this book. I slept on it. I'm still not sure how I feel about it. Everything started out so good. This book was fun and funny. It had characters I wanted to drive to Boston and find. It had a treasure hunt. It had brooding billionaires who are hiding secrets. It had a female main character who was wondrously odd and didn't really care what other people thought.
Then it all kind of fell apart. The whole premise of this book was suppose to be some big Boston-wide treasure hunt headed by an eccentric deceased billionaire. Sure that happened. Was it the main focus of the book? Not so much. Tuesday and her "crew" find two clues. Then everything disappears for about 100 pages. The reader then needs to slog through flashbacks, pages of mental anguish, and inner monologues that reminded me of high school football coach pep talks.
Maybe now you're thinking "Well that doesn't really sound like fun". It wasn't fun. But it wasn't not fun either. In other hands, this kind of drop in action might have made this book a DNF for me. Racculia managed to keep me reading. Not necessarily because I wanted to know what happened with the billionaire's game but because I genuinely wanted to know what happened to Tuesday. And Dex. And Archie.
Eventually we come back to the billionaire's game. The fun returns for a minute. Then everything turns strangely dramatic. Bordering on horrific. Rather Lifetime movie like. This is what really brought the book down for me. Even with the slightly boring middle, this book still had the potential to be a five star read for me. Then the end happened. At the end we are given a character who is so basically evil all he needs is a mustache to twirl. I mean, he's just a bastard. He's your typical "I'm rich and I can get away with literally anything I want" kind of dude. Compared to Racculia's other cast of characters, this guy felt completely out of place. At one point, the end of the story felt like I had switched to a completely different story. Subtract two stars.
Then there was the end, end. Without given too much away, it was predictable. Painfully predictable. The only way it might work for me is if the author has plans for a Tuesday Mooney series going forward. This is just the kind of thing that screams cozy series turns into hit television series. Only if Kristen Ritter is Tuesday Mooney.
At the end of the day, would I recommend this book? Umm...I wouldn't not recommend it. It was a light, quick read that sandwiched itself in nicely with some of the more intense reads I have going right now. For a lot of people who are currently having problems reading because the world around them is just too much, this is a book that will help take your mind off things if only for a minute.
Read 5/11/2020 - 5/16/2020
Book 33/75
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