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Josie Toadfern owns a laundromat and has become a bit of a celebrity as her stain-removing column has begun to be published widely in her home area. She's hoping to go national soon. She should be happy but she is fast approaching her 30th birthday and she still doesn't have a full-time boyfriend and she feels her life is getting away from her. For her 30th birthday celebration, Josie's closest friends take her to the Great Walleye Drop in Port Clinton, Ohio. It's not much of a big-time celebration but Josie appreciates her friends' thoughts. Also, her old and unliked teacher, Mrs Oglevee, who passed away a few years before, has been visiting Josie in her dreams. Mrs Oglevee has been demanding that Josie find out how she really died. It was thought she had a heart attack just before she was to leave on a big trip, but the teacher has an idea that something else happened and she wants Josie to find out what it was. And then, when Josie has the dubious honor of giving a speech about Mrs Oglevee when her bequest to the town comes through, a strange woman passes Josie a note saying that the woman is really Mrs Oglevee's illegitimate child and that Mrs Oglevee was really murdered. Since the Great Walleye Drop is taking place in Mrs Oglevee's hometown Josie thinks she might as well delve into the question and give her teacher some peace. When she gets to town and starts asking questions, she finds out that her prim teacher had some huge secrets of her own. She used to be the girlfriend of a small-time mobster and had been a stripper! Before long it's made too clear to Josie that someone in town is very unhappy that the old subject is being brought up again as attempts are made to stop her from uncovering anything else! MURDER UNFOLDS is more of a chick-lit book than a murder mystery. The murder is just there so that Josie and her girlfriends can travel together and complain about their lives and their boyfriends, or their lack thereof. Josie is dating two guys that have some potential, one friend has an on-again, off-again, battling love affair with the local deputy, while her other friend is too busy bringing up three sons by herself to even care about dating again. In reading this book. It felt that the author Sharon Short spent more time and effort in telling us about the outfits the girls had on that she did in putting the murder mystery together. MURDER UNFOLDS didn't grab me and hold me with its story. Josie and her friends struck me as rather silly and they didn't have as much interest in solving the mystery as they had in teasing each other and playing cutesy with their boyfriends. If you like your murder mystery on the light side, with little tension, ghostly appearances, fish costumes, Elvis impersonators, fish parades, fighting lovers and so much pouting and arm-slapping action that makes the story decay into the category of wacky then this book is for you.
Reviewed by A. L. Katz, April 2007
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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