For the first meeting of the Ashton Corners Mystery Readers and Cheese Straws Society, six friends gather in Molly Matthews's old Southern mansion-including Lizzie Turner, a reading specialist with a penchant for mysteries. But the mystery book club meeting becomes the scene of an actual murder when a stranger is shot-and nobody knows who the victim is, or how Molly' antique gun came to be used as the murder weapon.

Then Lizzie begins finding mysterious manuscript chapters in her mailbox. As she and the book club members try to read between the lines, Molly surfaces as the next name on the killer's list...

Review

For fans of:  Lucy Arlington

When reading specialist Elizabeth “Lizzie” Turner decides to start a mystery-lovers’ book club in the tiny town of Ashton Corners, she can’t think of any place more perfect to hold the meetings than the stately Southern mansion of friend and fellow bibliophile Molly Matthews.  And thankfully, Molly agrees with Lizzie on that point, happily welcoming the club’s members into her home for good food and lively discussion.  On the night of their very first get-together, though, the group’s good cheer is quickly doused when a stranger lets himself into Molly’s home and then refuses to provide his name.  When confronted, he claims he just wants to use the phone to call for a tow truck, but later that evening, the man is found shot dead in his (fully functional) car – which is still parked out in front of Molly’s house.

Who was this man? What was his real reason for coming to Molly’s home? And why was he killed? Is one of the book club members a murderer – or does the fact that the group was present at the scene of the crime make them all targets?

A Killer Read is the first of Erika Chase’s Ashton Corners Book Club Mysteries.  I confess, while I love discovering new series, Chase’s debut doesn’t exactly have me itching to order the sequel.  Her central conceit – that the core characters all belong to a mystery-lovers’ book club – has the potential to be a lot of fun (deep down, don’t all mystery lovers want a chance to play amateur sleuth?); unfortunately, however, Chase never takes advantage of her setup, instead choosing to focus on the fact that her main character, Lizzie, is a “reading specialist” for the local school system – a noble profession, to be sure, but not a particularly exciting one, and certainly not one on which an author should hang a book, let alone a series. 

The mystery itself is cleverly set up, but quickly devolves into something convoluted and implausible, and the solution is neither thrilling nor earned.  There isn’t much drama or tension to the tale because Chase spends too much time describing Lizzie’s clothes, snacking habits, and workday tasks (think classroom observations, tutoring sessions, and literacy exams) and too little forwarding the central plot.  I think most people read traditional mysteries to have fun, to be thrilled and/or have their hearts warmed, and to live vicariously through a hero or heroine who’s living his or her dream; A Killer Read doesn’t help the reader accomplish any of these goals.  The characters are bland and flat, the dialogue is stiff, and the relationships are unrealistic and lacking in chemistry.   A good traditional mystery should lift your spirits, but the world Chase has created is actually kind of depressing, full of people who are broken, stuck, sad, or just plain boring; who wants to escape real life just to wind up in company like that?

Final verdict:  Great concept, poorly executed.

Reviewed by Kat N.

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