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I read this book because it was described as 'A Wine Lover's Mystery,' and I guess after a fashion I'm a wine lover, as well as a mystery reader. I wanted something relaxing to read, and what could be more undemanding than a mystery set in Napa Valley, which I knew from my San Francisco days. Other than the wine with food recipes sprinkled throughout the book, the story is somewhat formulaic: a person (such as Nikki Sands) acts as an amateur detective because oneself, or a friend or relative is suspected of murder, or, (as is also the case with Nikki Sands) because 'she really couldn't help herself.' We go with Nikki through Napa County, Sonoma County, and San Francisco from suspect to suspect, usually with a glass of some different wine in our hands. The suspects are many, two wine company owners, some of their employees and relatives, and a host of beautiful people, both male and female, associated with them. Nikki is a failed movie actress who has been six months in a job for a wine company where she becomes sales manager and learns the wine business. The present book is the second in a series, and Nikki had already solved one murder when she first started her job (see MURDER UNCORKED). There are two men in her life, her boss who owns the company, and the brother of her best friend Isabel -- she's the person arrested. Two other men whom Nikki refers to as the "Boys of Summer" are her friends, but they're not looking for heterosexual romance. The women in the story include the rather dislikeable bride of the second company owner, her sister, her former roommate, the groom's elderly aunt, and another of the groom's ex-lovers. Some other men and women fill out the characters, who are somewhat too many for readers to get to know well. Nikki seems as much involved in trying to solve her own confusion over her two romantic interests as about solving the murder; that is, she puts in considerable effort on both cases. Unlike many amateur detectives, she does not get in trouble with the police, but her investigations don't seem to have much verisimilitude. She talks in person or by phone to virtual strangers and starts asking very forward questions, and they unsuspectingly pour out a cornucopia of everything she wants to know. She thinks nothing of lying to get her informants talking since she "didn't consider it lying exactly, because it was really a means to an end." It's not a bad story for what it claims to be, light-hearted, easy-reading escape fiction that will most likely appeal to a given type of reader. There is, however, one bad tendency that's appearing more and more in genre fiction, that of using celebrities as Wagnerian leitmotifs in place of writing inventiveness. An attractive woman is "almost too much Sex and the City." We can imagine how someone dresses her hair because it's "the latest Jennifer Anniston style." When Nikki finds herself getting overly suspicious, the situation is "getting a bit too Jerry Springer for her." Some X-rated photos "might put Paris Hilton to shame." San Francisco becomes "the city where Tony Bennett leaves his heart." We get a clue to what the murdered woman was like because "she had no plans of playing June Cleaver." Strangely enough, I'd started the book with a bottle of not wine, but beer, Germany's Einbecker Ur-Bock, dunkel, 6.5 percent alcohol, with a perfect predominance of malt and just the right countertaste of hops. But I finished it more appropriately with a glass of Australia's Jacob's Creek Reserve 2001 medium-bodied Shiraz, whose soft-textured flavor was evocative of pepper, licorice, plums, and cherries. Cheers!
Reviewed by Eugene Aubrey Stratton, June 2006
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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