Rancher and folk-art-museum curator Benni Harper has her hands full planning San Celina’s inaugural Memory Festival.  Add to that the fact that she and the other members of the Coffin Star Quilt Guild have got to finish their graveyard quilt for display and raffle at the festival, and she’s barely got free time to think.  But when a sniper starts taking shots at members of the local police force, Benni’s life is thrown even further into disarray.  The attacks start triggering violent flashbacks for her PTSD-afflicted husband, police chief Gabe Ortiz.  A close family friend is wounded right in front of Benni.  And a mysterious woman comes to town who seems all-too-interested in Benni’s life with Gabe – and much too familiar with Gabe’s past.  Can Benni help catch the sniper and restore order to both her town and her marriage?

Spider Web is book number fifteen in Earlene Fowler’s Benni Harper Mystery series.  It’s the first I’ve read of Fowler’s books, and I have to tell you, it’ll probably be the last.

It’s not that Spider Web is a bad book; the fact that fourteen installments have come before it implies that the series has quite a following.  No, I think it’s more that this book just wasn’t written for me. 

Now, I’m usually opposed to the notion that you have to identify with a protagonist in order to enjoy a book.  On the contrary, I tend to equate reading mysteries with going on vacation; who wouldn’t want to spend a few days in the shoes of someone who leads a life completely different from your own?  Someone who lives in small idyllic town, does her ideal job, and just happens to have a knack for catching murderers?  But for some reason, try as I might, I just can’t connect with Benni Harper.  Benni’s a Western gal.  A widow.  A historian.  She rides horses and she inoculates cattle and she’s married to a police chief who frequently lapses into Spanish and who came back from Vietnam with a whopping case of PTSD.  And there’s nothing wrong with any of those things.  But while you’d think a heroine with so many distinct and unique character traits would come across on the page as fully fleshed and wonderfully three-dimensional, (for me, at least) Benni just doesn’t ring true.  She talks a lot, but you never really get a good look inside her head.  There’s no emotional connection between Benni and the reader, which is frustrating considering the fact that you spend over three hundred pages in her company.

The same could be said for the book’s backdrop.  I’m sure the part of California where Fowler sets her books is gorgeous and positively chock full of history and charm; I’ve actually been considering a visit to the region myself for the past few years.  But Fowler’s San Celina lacks personality.  It feels more like a studio backdrop than a real town, further adding to the book’s dusty, distant, two-dimensional feel.

The pacing is a tad slow, with no real sense of drama or danger until a good hundred-plus pages in, and the book is ultimately less about solving a mystery and catching a killer than it is about Benni’s concerns about her marriage.  The sniper storyline seems less a central plot-point than a vehicle to provoke Gabe’s flashbacks, and the whole mystery-woman angle resolves itself in such a ridiculous, convoluted manner that you find yourself wondering why Fowler bothered to include it.

I like my mysteries to be thrilling, exciting reads, but to me, Spider Web was preachy, heavy-handed, tonally uneven, and kind of boring.  If you’re already a fan of Earlene Fowler, you’ll likely enjoy this book.  But if you’re hunting for a fun new series, you should probably focus your search elsewhere.

~ Kat