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POPPED
by Carol Higgins Clark
Pocket Books, July 2004
368 pages
$6.99
ISBN: 0743476654


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Regan Reilly, a Los Angeles PI, is on the road to Las Vegas. An old friend from school is making a pilot for a reality show that features three married couples and a hot air balloon. His production has been experiencing a few too many accidents and he wants Regan to investigate.

Between phone calls to her mother and her boyfriend, Regan tries to figure out what's going on. The owner of the Hot Air Cable network has set two TV production crews against each other. Whichever tapes the better show will get on the air. The owner has dictated the cast and crews of both shows and insists that each storyline contains something to do with hot air ballooning. This makes for some competition, but Regan can't discover which member of the other crew would wilfully try to ruin her friend's chances for a hit.

I could tell you more about this, the seventh in Carol Higgins Clark's Regan Reilly series, but honesty, it isn't worth the effort. This book is sloppily written with no redeeming attributes. The characters are cartoonish, the set-up weak, with a flat, lackluster ending, and the writing style is amateurish. Regan doesn't help her client or discover anything while on the job. She mostly asks herself obvious questions without ever solving anything.

Unfortunately, the reader can't help but see what's going on right away and when the ending comes, it reveals what the reader thought was just a given. Rarely do I resent the time I spend reading, but when I finished this book, all I could feel was bitterness that I wasted my time on it.

The biggest mystery surrounding this book is that after reading it in hardcover, I can't understand why would anyone feel there was a need to reprint it in paperback?

If you're one of the fans who have read the previous six Regan Reilly books, you'll probably like this one too, although why you would is another mystery to me. For the rest of the reading audience, I suggest you pass on POPPED. There's a world of better books to be read.

Reviewed by Sharon Katz, September 2004

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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