How to become the life of the party?
First, survive the celebration...

Rare book expert Brooklyn Wainwright is thrilled to be invited to the fiftieth birthday party of her neighbor Suzie's Aunt Grace. A retired founder of a major video games corporation, Grace is a larger-than-life character who's turned her Lake Tahoe mansion into a fun house, full of everything from pinball machines and giant props to secret passageways and trap doors. Brooklyn is most excited to catalog Grace's extensive collection of rare paperback pulp fiction.

Part of the fun involves a séance, but after the lights flicker, one guest is dead, poisoned by a cocktail intended for Grace. It seems someone is determined to turn Grace's playful palatial estate into a house of horrors. Brooklyn suspects the key to the killer's identity may lie in the roman á clef Grace has written about her life. With Grace in great peril, "must-read" takes on a whole new meaning, as Brooklyn tries to stop a murderer who's through playing around...

Series: Bibliophile Mysteries (Book 6)

Review

For fans of: Joyce and Jim Lavene

When rare books expert Brooklyn Wainwright is invited to attend the week-long 50th birthday celebration of her friend Suzie’s Aunt Grace, she quickly accepts; Grace is a rich and eccentric woman with a beautiful house on Lake Tahoe and a museum-worthy book collection – why on earth would she ever say no?

At first, the party is everything Brooklyn hoped for and more; the food is marvelous, the bar is fully stocked, and Grace has planned all kinds of entertainment to keep her friends and family occupied.  But when one of the guests drops dead after imbibing a poisoned drink intended for Grace, Brooklyn’s forced to wonder if someone RSVP’d in the positive just so they could ensure that their host never sees another birthday…

Peril in Paperback is the sixth of Kate Carlisle’s Bibliophile Mysteries.  I confess, while I really love manor house mysteries, I wanted to like this book a whole lot more than I actually did.  Peril in Paperback quite simply tries too hard.  It tries too hard to be clever, it tries too hard to be quirky, and it tries to hard to be edgy, and all that trying gets – well, it gets a bit trying.  The setup is far-fetched; the prose is littered with lengthy digressions that distract from the plot and hinder the pace; and the mystery and climax both are simultaneously so convoluted as to be preposterous, and tie off too neatly to be plausible.  There’s a fair amount of drama, but in almost every instance, its impact is undercut by the random and often pointless fluff that surrounds it.  And for a manor house mystery, the book has disappointingly little sense of place; Grace’s house is described as a fantastical manor – full of beautiful furnishings, trap doors, holograms, and secret passages – but Carlisle fails to bring it to life on the page. 

Brooklyn is a likable enough main character, but her narration borders on manic, making it tiresome to spend too long in her company.  Several major series characters make appearances in this book, but Carlisle doesn’t do enough to re-establish them in the minds of old readers or properly introduce them to new ones.  As for the supporting cast, it’s woefully underdeveloped and too large by half.  Carlisle fails to sufficiently distinguish one guest or employee from another, forcing the reader to pause for a beat every time someone new enters a scene to try and figure out who that character is and how he or she relates to everyone else in the room.

If you’re already a fan of Kate Carlisle’s Bibliophile Mysteries, by all means, pick up Peril in Paperback; it’s a perfectly competent read, and you'll never guess all of Carlisle's many twists and turns.  But if you’re a stickler for quick pacing, solid plotting, and realistic characters, you’re probably better off focusing your search elsewhere.

Reviewed by Kat N.

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