Don’t Judge a (scrap)book by It’s Cover: Cut, Crop, Die by Joanna Campell Sloan

Sorry about the blog post title.  I couldn’t resist.

The second book in the Kiki Lowenstein Scrap-n-Craft mystery series (quite a long name there isn’t it?) I picked this one up because it was the “deal of the week” according to my Pixel of Ink bargain kindle books email.  While it wasn’t clearly advertised this was the *second* book in the series (in fact I think somewhere in the email it said this was the beginning of the series) I didn’t have a hard time picking up the pieces and figuring out all the friendships, frenemies, family animosities, and love triangles that had happened in book 1 so the jump into the series wasn’t too difficult.

As you can tell from the blog title or if you’ve read any of my posts at all, you’ll know that the two things I love most are books and crafts.  While I’m not a scrapbooker by any means (I tried once but found I much prefer doing things the digital way) I like fellow crafters.  We all have to stick together, and even if we stitchers are the superior crafters by far, I hold scrapbookers close as kindred spirits.  So when I saw this cozy crafting mystery I thought I’d give it a try.

Now, when I think cozy-mystery I think Miss Marple.  I loved her books through grade and middle school in my Agatha Christie phase and have been trying to go back and

rediscover the classics I haven’t read yet after my seven year trek into the world of Kingsian and Lovecraftian horror.  But tangent aside, I don’t really go in for the cozy mystery that’s really 90% romance novel with dead bodies popping up just so they can be called something else.  Which is really what this turned out to be.  Nothing wrong with it, I won’t say any genre isn’t legitimate because they all have fans. This just wasn’t for me.

Kiki works for scrapbooking store “Time in a Bottle” and her scrapbooking nemesis Yvonne is killed and a scrap meet after eating a scone laced with orange flavored aspirin.  The scrapbooking store is held under suspicion, with angry scrappers more than happy to leave hate filled messages on the voicemail and boycott their events.  Of course this means rival scrapbook store rises up to take advantage and beat the competition once and for all.  And if that’s not enough drama you have Kiki’s discovery her kind-of-sort-of-man-friend-boyfriend is really married, an introduction to hunky gardener, a teen daughter growing up, and a mother-in-law that likes to hunt gophers.  The mystery itself is well done for a cozy, not too many plot twists and a reasonable (if obvious) ending.

If the book had just stuck to that it would have been stronger.  However, Campbell-Slan goes off on a variety of tangents in her book.  The most out of place is a series of anti-semetic attacks on the scrapbooking store that have nothing to do with the murder and feel very out of place.  While it seems these were meant as red-herrings, they just come across as confusing and a little ridiculous.  Then there is the author’s obsession with Saint Louis.   As someone born and bred in the STL the setting was one of the main reasons I was willing to give this mystery a shot, but after reading the first couple chapters it became obvious the author has never been more than a tourist in my city and that’s the way her characters come across as well, as tourists in their home town, constantly rattling off statistics, random facts, and tourist destinations in their own city.  This would annoy me regardless of setting, but knowing my city as well as I do I spent most of time picking out flaws and misrepresentations.

An interesting mystery with a very creative cover, but not a series I’d go out of my way to stick with.  I’d only recommend to someone looking for a feel-good mystery that’s light on the gore and intrigue but heavy on the romance.