Fantasies Are Murder by TJ Perkins, a Mysterious Review.

Review: Fantasies Are Murder is the first book in the Kim & Kelly mystery series written for young adults. Originally published in 1994 by Booksurge (the self-publishing company of Amazon.com), this edition was published by GumShoe Press.

There are numerous production and editing flaws in Fantasies Are Murder that significantly mar this otherwise reasonable effort by TJ Perkins. Perkins has recently become her own self-publisher, setting up GumShoe Press to publish her work. She should be applauded for this effort, but the lack of quality control on her own work is hard to understand.

Grammar, punctuation, and capitalization errors abound. Numerous words are misspelled, including, notably, the title of Chapter 6 ("Eves Dropping" instead of "Eavesdropping"). Incredibly, the review copy was listed as a second printing; it is difficult to believe that these problems weren't corrected between printings.

The story is basically a good one, based loosely on the Clue game. Young readers are likely to be familiar with Clue and therefore will understand the underlying premise of the story. But putting Kim and Kelly at risk of being killed in cold blood not once, but several times, is completely unnecessary. The story could have been told just as effectively, with just as much suspense, without having a loaded gun pointed at the girls.

Three additional titles were published simultaneously with this one. Hopefully, both the quality of the publication, as well as the story, told will improve in subsequent installments of this series.

Acknowledgment: GumShoe Press provided a copy of Fantasies Are Murder for this review.

Fantasies Are Murder

A Kim & Kelly Mystery by TJ Perkins