About
Reviews
Search
Submit
Home

Mystery Books for Sale

[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]


  

BLONDES IN TROUBLE AND OTHER TANGLED TALES
by Serita Stevens, editor
Intrigue Press, March 2004
300 pages
$14.00
ISBN: 1890768561


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Do gentlemen really prefer blondes? Is it true that blondes have more fun? Is there any accuracy in all those dumb blonde jokes? Smart blondes, natural blondes, bottle blondes, platinum blondes -- they're all in here. BLONDES IN TROUBLE AND OTHER TANGLED TALES provides 18 takes on many of these age-old questions in this collection of short stories.

Steven-Elliot Altman's story gets the collection off to a fine start. Even a Broken Clock brings us a crooked private investigator who thinks he's in control when a beautiful blonde client walks through his door. In Vicki Cameron's Sequined Blonde, a vacationing camper comes across a blonde improbably clad in a cocktail dress smack dab in the middle of the woods. What starts out as understandable curiosity on the camper's part becomes more critical when said blonde ends up very dead.

Two blondes (artificial) have to band together in Three Blondes Living on Geary by Meg Chittenden in order to save their blonde roommate (natural) from a romance gone bad. The protagonist of Sophie Dunbar's Drugstore Blonde is a talented hairdresser who needs her skills and her wits to unravel a mystery involving a TV star attempting a comeback.

A clever student in forensic science has a brush with Ted Bundy in Love-Bite Murders by E J Glenski. The protagonist of Malachi Saxon and Anne Perry's I Spy proves once and for all that one shouldn't judge a woman by her hair color in this World War I tale. And then there's Marilyn. Or rather, a Marilyn Monroe impersonator, who in Serita Mendelson Steven's The Blonde Bombshell, learns more than may be good for her about the real Marilyn's death.

There is a definite art to writing short stories; overall, the authors of the pieces in BLONDES IN TROUBLE AND OTHER TANGLED TALES have mastered that. The stories range in genre, which can make for disjointed reading. It is, however, a really clever idea to use the blonde as a thematic device -- particularly since she's such a strong part of western popular culture. If you enjoy short stories, this is definitely worth a whirl. As an added incentive, the collection's proceeds go to charity.

Reviewed by Michelle L. Zafron, April 2004

[ Top ]


QUICK SEARCH:

 

Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]