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I didn't expect to like this book. I read it in part because the author was nice enough to ask me to review it and in part because it's set in Seattle, where I 've lived for over ten years. The protagonist, Carnegie Kincaid, is a wedding planner. That was part of the problem -- a wedding planner is not my cup of coffee. I'm not big on what I see as upper-class lives. But Carnegie is an interesting and together woman. I liked her more than I expected to. I got her more than I thought; she's an organizer, and I relate to that. She's in the tradition of energetic self-employed protagonists we've seen lately; women like Jerilyn Farmer's caterer, or Mary Freeman's gardener, for example, women trying to get by, earn a living and prove their worth, taking jobs that put then into contact with lots of people, many of whom can be very stressed out. The bride here disappears at the wedding, a victim of a kidnapping. Carnegie helps cover up the disappearance, and gets involved in trying to figure out what happened. Not surprisingly, there's more going on that meets the eye; the bride's father is in some varying kinds of trouble. There are interfering relatives, business problems, you name it.Ý I had a major gripe with the story, I admit. I found the relationship issue that showed up to be tell-tale; I've seen it before, and thought it was something that a writer who hasn't read a lot of mystery fiction would write, but that someone more familiar with the genre would never have done. It was predictable, but that's very possibly me, and it wouldn't be thought so by another, less picky reader. To balance that out, I will say that Donnelly does a good job with the aspect of the amateur sleuth; the not-very-believable "I have to find the killer" aspect which we all tire of after a while. Kincaid needs to keep working; she can't risk a bad reputation, and she has competition, she has dissatisfied parents to deal with, she has subcontractors to keep happy. The plotting is good; the protagonist doesn't do too many dumb things (another risk of amateur sleuths, especially female ones) and is willing to admit she makes mistakes, which she tends to do, sometimes annoyingly short-sighted ones. So, she's human. The Seattle setting is well handled by the author who used to live here. Kincaid lives and works on a houseboat, which yes, we do have here in Seattle (don't they sound tempting? but where would you keep all those books?) and the story moves well. I think this is a promising series.
Reviewed by Andi Shechter, January 2002
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