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THE LLAMA OF DEATH
by Betty Webb
Poisoned Pen Press, January 2013
270 pages
$22.95
ISBN: 1464200661


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

In THE LLAMA OF DEATH, the third zoo mystery with protagonist Theodora (Teddy) Bentley, Teddy has been sent to run the Llama Roundup at the local Renaissance Faire. Teddy is unhappy to be away from her duties as a zookeeper at the Gunn Zoo, but she's even more dismayed when she finds the dead body of a mail order minister in the llama pen in the middle of the night. To make matters worse, Teddy's own mother was known to have been quite unhappy with the dead man making her the prime suspect. The local sheriff who is also Teddy's fiancé, is across the country in Virginia for Homeland Security training, leaving Teddy to feel that she must step up and solve the crime to free her mother.

The author, Betty Webb, has a large following of devoted readers, many of whom read both her very gritty “Desert” series and the Gunn Zoo mysteries. While the Desert series seems to be getting stronger with each entry, the Gunn Zoo books seem to be flailing. There are three things about this series that seem to be going in the wrong direction as the series progresses.

Teddy is unhappy that she is has to be away from the zoo so much to work at the Renaissance Faire. Readers should be as well. With each new entry into this series, Teddy is spending less and less time at the zoo and more time doing other things. If readers pick up this book and think they are going to get a zoo based mystery, they will probably be disappointed.

Secondly, there is a tendency to anthropomorphize the animals in the series. I don't mean the animals talk or wear clothes, but the animals are given human emotions and treated as human characters. For example, there is a snake that gets loose in this book and the snake (obviously with the help of a human) tweets about her adventures. In an earlier book, an anteater gave birth with a running monologue addressed to the reader. This may well appeal to some readers, but for some, even some animal lovers, it just doesn't work.

The last point is both a strength and a weakness. The book is less than 300 pages long, but there are many characters who play a fairly substantial role in the book. Most of these are strong characters, many with over the top personalities which make for a zany cast of characters. There is also quite a bit of action in the book with quite a few venues. This gives the reader a mad-cap adventure, but it also can be a bit confusing to keep up with it all.

This book will appeal to readers who like colorful characters and a bit of humor along with their murder. Fans of the Gunn Zoo series will probably not be disappointed in LLAMA, but readers who prefer that animals in their mysteries remain animals may not be quite so forgiving.

§ Caryn St.Clair resides in University City, Missouri and is a former elementary school media specialist, President of the Parks Commission and a docent at the St.Louis Zoo.

Reviewed by Caryn St Clair, December 2012

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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