Wednesday, April 2, 2014

That Touch of Ink - Review

That Touch of Ink by Diane Vallere


Rating: 3 Stars

Description:  When Doris Day lookalike and Interior Decorator, Madison Night receives a $5000 bill in the mail she knows her past has become her present.  This becomes even more apparent when her past, in the form of her ex-boyfriend Brad, shows up at her door.  Soon Madison has stumbled on a dead body, reconnected with homicide detective and former kind of boyfriend Tex and all chaos has broken out.  Can Madison figure everything out before she becomes a thing of the past?

Genre:  Mystery

My Impression: This is the 2nd in the Mad for Mod series.  Normally the series order isn't that important for mysteries but this one gets a little confusing.  There's a lot of back story on Brad and other characters that is somewhat explained but I think would've made a lot more sense if I had read the first book.  Though the setting was super-cutesy with all the Doris Day type decor and references the mystery was good.  This was more of a figuring out what happened and what was going on then a typical cozy type mystery with a certain set of known suspects.  There was a lot of discussion that Madison secretly owned the apartment building she lived in.  While I can understand why in real life you wouldn't want to advertise you were the building's owner if you lived there in real life but all the stress and talk of it just seemed unnecessary in the fiction world.  I also thought that while Hudson was a nice guy adding him to the whole love triangle/tangle just made it messier.  While Madison for the most part behaved like an adult Officer Nast's behavior was on the childish side and she probably could've gotten in serious trouble for her unprofessionalism.   Overall, this was a fun, fast paced if slightly messy mystery with just enough mod decor references to keep it fun.

Would I Read More of this Series/Author?: Yes.  This series has a lot of promise.  I definitely want to find the first book in the series.

Would I Recommend this Book?:  Yes, I think most mystery readers would enjoy this.

2 comments:

  1. I can see what you mean by messy! I haven't heard of this series before, but it might be worth checking out. I'm very picky about cozies, I confess.

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  2. I am picky too! There's so many bad cozies out there. This one didn't hit any of my long list of pet peeves even though it had a few too many characters. I bought the first book the other day so I'm hoping it lives up to the promise of this book!

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