UltraViolet
A Jane Kelly
Mystery
Nancy Bush
Kensington Books (Hardcover)
ISBN-10: 0-7582-0909-6 (0758209096)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7582-0909-2 (9780758209092)
Publication Date: October 2007
List Price: $19.95
Synopsis (from
the publisher): For process server-turned-private investigator, Jane
Kelly, weddings are murder. Usually that’s a metaphor, but
for newly minted P.I. Jane Kelly, it’s fast becoming an
all-too-accurate nightmare. Roland Hatchmere, plastic surgery magnate,
has been found murdered just before his daughter’s society
wedding. The weapon is a wedding gift: a heavy, silver serving tray.
The prime suspect is Roland’s ex-wife #2: Violet
“Ultraviolet” Purcell, she of the
eccentric-bordering-on-insane Purcell clan.
Violet insists that she’s completely innocent. After all,
Roland was her absolute favorite ex-husband. And she was nowhere NEAR
him at the time of the murder. Well, okay, technically she did meet him
for a little pre-nup, bedroom
tête-à-tête just before. And they did
have a huge fight. And she did hit him with the tray. But just once.
Honest. So could Jane just hurry up and prove her innocence? Sure. That
should be easy. Let’s just file this one under “12
Kinds of Crazy.” But when Jane’s boss, the
temporarily sidelined Dwayne, is convinced Violet’s telling
the truth, well, there’s nothing for Jane to do but take her
lovable, misfit pug, Binky, and sniff out a few clues.
Everywhere Jane and The Binkster look, there’s a suspect
odder than the last, including two grown, very troubled kids, an
ex-wife strung out on Botox and a current wife who’s a cross
between Donna Reed and a sex kitten—all of them eager to
blame Roland’s death on Violet. It doesn’t help
that Violet’s story keeps changing faster than a
celebrity’s hair extensions. To make matters worse,
Dwayne’s convalescence is turning him into Jimmy Stewart in
“Rear Window,” complete with binoculars, and
he’s convinced there is something very bad going down in the
private houses across Lakewood Bay, something that needs Jane and
Binky’s close attention. Faster than she can say,
“I took criminology courses for this?”, Jane is up
to her eyeballs in lies, secrets, Extreme Botox, New Wave bands,
truck-stop coffee kiosks (don’t ask), very good scones,
Junior League, wedding bandits, high school sociopaths, Plastic Pet
Cemetery (don’t ask, part II), a budding attraction to her
boss, the Millionaire’s Club, and someone who would kill to
keep the past buried.
The deeper Jane digs, the less she wants to know. Every truth leads her
deeper into danger, and soon, Jane wonders if her first official case
might also be her last…and if the client she’s
been asked to clear just might be the coldest black widow of all
…
Review:
Jane Kelly gets involved in all sorts of mayhem in Nancy Bush's breezy
third mystery featuring the Oregon private investigator, UltraViolet.
Jane's primary case has her investigating whether Violet Purcell, the
"UltraViolet" in the book's title, murdered her ex-husband and if she
did not, who did. The murder weapon: a silver serving tray that was a
gift to her daughter who just happened to be getting married on the
fateful day. Violet doesn't deny hitting him with the tray during an
argument though she insists he was alive and well when she left. Most
of the wedding guests are potential suspects leaving Jane to determine
who had the greatest motive to murder the father of the bride.
UltraViolet
is certainly entertaining but, at well over 350 pages, it is far too
long. Part of the problem here is an astonishing amount of repetition
of facts. In the first chapter, for example, the reader is informed no
less than 10 times that Jane's employer Dwayne has had an accident and
his broken leg is in a cast. Unless the author is concerned about
readers skimming through the pages, it's unnecessary to be so
repetitive. Having Dwayne be a semi-invalid, however, allows Bush to
fill more space in the book by introducing a second Hitchcockian plot involving
mysterious happenings across the bay. In some ways, and probably
ironically, this subplot is more interesting than the whodunit at the
wedding.
Despite Jane's nearly constant activity (she seems to burn more
calories in a day than most people do in a week), the author keeps the
story briskly moving forward. Bush is adept at misdirection and as the
number of suspects dwindles in the waning pages, it's still something
of a surprise to find out who killed Violet's ex. And that's probably
the most important part of a mystery, to keep the reader guessing until
the very end.
Special thanks to Nancy Berland Public Relations for providing an ARC of UltraViolet for this review.
Review Copyright © 2007 — Hidden Staircase Mystery Books — All Rights Reserved.
Mysteries in this series ...
Candy Apple Red
Kensington Books (Hardcover), October 2005
ISBN-10: 0-7582-0905-3 (0758209053)
Electric Blue
Kensington Books (Hardcover), October 2006
ISBN-10: 0-7582-0907-X (075820907X)
UltraViolet
Kensington Books (Hardcover), October 2007
ISBN-10: 0-7582-0909-6 (0758209096)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7582-0909-2 (9780758209092)
Omnimystery keywords for Ultra Violet ...
Location(s) referenced: Oregon.