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Fifi Cutter has a large, multi-racial and troubled family. Her mother and father have been married more times than Fifi cares to count and she has half siblings that come in every color of the rainbow. Most are at war with each other. Fifi herself is the object of contempt because her father recently passed away and left his house to her. Her other siblings are angry and Fifi takes great pains to keep out of their way, especially now that she can't make the taxes on the house and may lose it. When her white half-brother Bosco Dorff, from their mother's side, suddenly shows up he tells her that he thinks that the death of an 'uncle' of theirs, Ted Heffernan, was not natural but a murder and he has somehow talked the two of them into a way to be paid big bucks by the uncle's company to investigate, Fifi isn't interested. But Bosco can talk anyone into doing anything, and so, though not at all trained to be anything but a car insurance adjuster, Fifi takes on the job of finding the real killer – and takes on the harder job of getting Bosco to get off his rump to help. It seems that Bosco talked one of the soon-to-be-partners of the uncle's company into paying them to investigate the possible murder. And then in addition, he talked the company into hiring them as grief counselors! How did he do it? Fifi, doesn't want to know. Hard as it is to get Bosco to help investigate, or even pay for lunch, Fifi gets cracking. As they investigate, they find that Ted had a hand in many different things, including insurance on a porn filmmaking business. As they 'grief counsel' his fellow workers, suddenly the pool of suspects enlarges, as both his wife and children and his well-known mistress all make claims on Ted's estate. At first I thought that this might be an interesting new series. After all, I don't know of many other bi-racial, 20-something, wise-talking female, and accident investigators as leads in other cozies. Unfortunately, Fife's acerbic wit ruined the book early on for me. It started to fall flat when she took no more than a moment to use her own prejudices to look down at other people and call them worthless. Though the writer Gwen Freeman does have a flair for creating interesting and outrageous characters, and the dialogue flows fast and has punch, because Fifi, and most of the people in the book, turn out to be so unlikable, I found that I didn't much care what happened. I didn't care if Fifi got hurt and neither did I care if Ted was killed or not. That undercut the whole book. By the end of the story, and Fife's sudden flash of insight as to the solution of the deed, I was scanning the pages, wondering when the book would finally end. WHATEVER . . . This is the first of a new series, and I hope that Fifi and her cohorts in future books make themselves much more likeable. A mystery series needs more than just a murder and a list of different people to keep readers interested. It needs a main character that we really want to meet again. MURDER... SUICIDE... WHATEVER... pretty much falls into the category of whatever ... when you read it.
Reviewed by A. L. Katz, February 2007
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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