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COURTING DISASTER
by Joanne Pence
Avon, December 2004
368 pages
$6.99
ISBN: 0060502916


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Angie Amalfi has made a bargain with her mother: Serefina will not interfere with the wedding plans if Serefina can throw the engagement party without any input from Angie. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now Angie is going crazy trying to figure out where the party is, what the color scheme is, what the favors are, and so on. Angie is between jobs as a freelance food writer, so she has lots of time to obsess about this.

Her upper-class nebbish of a neighbor, Stan, has become infatuated with a very pregnant kitchen helper at a local Greek restaurant. When Hannah turns to him in her hour of need, he drags Angie along for the ride. This turns neat-nik Stan into a schlemiel covered in baby-schmutz, sleeping on his own couch while a baby crib takes over the den where his Bow-Flex once was king.

Angie buys things for the baby (like the crib) and tries to get help for Hannah through the local family services system. Hannah's only other friend, Shelly Farms, is dead. Shelly, also known as Sherlock Farnsworth III, is an advocate for the homeless. His body washed up under the pier. Paavo Smith, Angie's fiance, is working on the case.

Angie spends most of COURTING DISASTER interfering in other people's lives, trying to spoil the surprise part of the party her mother is throwing, second-guessing her relationship with Paavo, and generally being a pain in the tuchis. Stan gets pushed around by any woman he encounters. Paavo is roped into helping his future father-in-law deal with a stalker; this is the same man who is less than excited about Paavo marrying his daughter.

Pence does connect this disparate parts into a coherent, if frequently confusing, whole. I was underwhelmed by COURTING DISASTER. The convention of the sleuth with cop boyfriend seemed strained in this particular book, although I suspect it has worked well in the previous ten or 11 books in this series.

I was heartily sick of Angie's compulsion to thwart her mother with respect to the party; the endless comparisons between Serefina's controlling nature and Angie's inability to see that same trait in herself wore very thin very quickly. I also wondered more than once just what exactly Angie lived on, since there seemed to be no real source of income.

I wanted to smack Stan and tell him to get a grip; he managed to figure this out for himself by the end of the book. Paavo is very uncomfortable with the role Sal Amalfi has designated for him in connection with the stalking employee; I have a hard time seeing Paavo coerced into doing something as against the grain as this.

The upside to COURTING DISASTER is that Pence makes the characters real enough that I feel strongly about what they are doing. The downside is that mostly I didn't like what they are doing and/or why they are doing it. The murder of Shelly Farms is relevant to the plot, but doesn't play a major role in the workings of the story.

There is another crime, which is very vital to the story, but it takes a long time to come to the forefront. So a lot of the books seems to dither about without much really happening. I find this annoying. I would not recommend this book as the first Pence to read. If I were following the series closely, I'd probably be willing to cut the author some slack if this is just one not-so-great book out of the dozen.

Reviewed by P. J. Coldren, June 2005

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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