 "Strap on your Depends!" | 2009-06-27 |
| - Reviewed By User: A22NR9KJ3CCZD |
One word... Depends®.
Now that that little matter is mentioned I can continue on my merry way.
" I just hope the MOB is happy".
Goodness, Laura Durham is friggin' hilarious... or she is related to Lucille Ball. Either way Better Off Wed is a rip-roaring adventure. Yep, this chick knows her comedy like Joan Rivers knows plastic surgery & the Don knows hair pieces. Yeah, Laura is gifted w/ comedic timing & she knows where to deliver it in a book.
Better Off Wed was given as gifts to anyone who wanted a good read. Which isn't always easy to find in a world filled w/ books w/ not much going on. Which is totally not eco cool.
Memo! Please stop wasting paper on drivel!
Better Off Wed is a tumultuous expedition in hilarity.
Laura Durham is a real-life wedding planner who held nothing back penning Better Off Wed.
Annabelle is charming, amusing & a sheer delight. Annabelle did not come from a ream of one dimensional amateur sleuths. Nope. Not even close. Annabelle owns "Wedding Belles" ~ love the name ~ & this is where the comedy & murder sprouts.
Annabelle's friend Richard is wickedly uproarious! In a nutshell... strap on some Depends®!!!
I was laughing so hard I thought I was losing it... okay, losing more of it.
Durham does an excellent job pointing the finger @ everyone... but pulls the ultimate illusion making the culprit a surprise. Applause & a bouquet of a medium-bodied cabernet sauvignon for that delectable feat.
Durham's Better Off Wed won the 2005 Agatha Award for Best First Novel. Not surprised! Read it & see for yourself.
The characters are quirky ~ from Kate to yummy Detective Reese. Whoa! It's getting hot in here. Spicy! He's enough to make you want to hop an Amtrak to DC.
The twists & turns keep you turning pages. It's a fast read & when you reach the last page you want to immediately grab For Better or Hearse Annabelle's 2nd wedding adventure.
Oh, you better just order To Love and To Perish to round out the screaming romp you'll be having & the men in the white coats can be eco-friendly & make one trip = Q! |
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 "Nothing interesting about this one" | 2008-07-29 |
| - Reviewed By User: A3NM5WEIP69FVX |
I bought this book because I was looking for a light, fun book to read. This book was certainly light, but it wasn't fun to read.
One of the biggest things I hated about this book was the characters. Well, they weren't really characters -- more like stereotypes. You had your boring responsible one. Then there was the flighty assistant who annoyingly mangles phrases while she sleeps with every straight male in DC. All the gay characters had a tendency to screech and faint. I didn't care a single bit about any of them -- because none of them ever came close to being real.
The plot itself bounced around to too many suspects -- that made me lose even more respect for the main character. She didn't seem to have any sort of brain. And because we kept bouncing from one person to another, I didn't bother to keep any of them straight in my mind.
If you want a book with characters that have a semblance of being real, rather than caricatures, then move on to something else. I wish I had. |
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 "Just Okay" | 2008-01-25 |
| - Reviewed By drebbles |
Wedding planner Annabelle Archer knew the wedding she was working on would be difficult, but she certainly wasn't expecting the mother of the bride to be murdered during the reception. The murder not only hurts Annabelle's reputation as a wedding planner, but her friend Richard Gerard, a caterer, is a major suspect. When there is a second murder which makes Richard even more of a suspect, Annabelle knows she has to work fast to clear his name. She has plenty of suspects but will she figure out who the killer is before she becomes the next victim?
"Better Off Wed" is an uneven cozy mystery. The unevenness comes from the characters as some of them are well written and others barely register as characters. Annabelle is well done - good at her job and concerned about her friends. Caterer Richard is also well written and author Laura Durham deserves credit for having readers discover Richard is gay without stating the obvious. Too bad she doesn't do the same with Annabelle's assistant Kate and her habit of mangling familiar sayings - Durham points every single one of them out, which is too bad because it was one of the humorous aspects of the book. Outside of Annabelle, Richard, Kate, and Annabelle's elderly neighbor Leatrice, the rest of the characters aren't well written especially the murder victim's family. Because of this, the murder mystery aspects of the book aren't that interesting and it's hard for readers to try to figure out who the murderer is, which is part of the fun of reading cozy mysteries. And when the murderer finally is revealed, the motive for the murder is unbelievable.
"Better Off Wed" is just an okay debut cozy mystery novel.
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| "Fun Cozy Mystery" | 2007-05-24 |
| - Reviewed By User: A1P2XYD265YE21 |
Annabelle Archer is an wedding planner in Washington D.C. I love Annabelle. She has a cozy apartment and a cozy life. Her caterer friend, Richard, makes some wedding foods that sound so good.
Someone is murdered at the wedding. Annabelle is determined to find out who did it. The clues are good.
Annabelle and Richard make the book really good. It is a very cozy book. I do not really care for Kate, though. But the rest of the book is strong enough to make up for Kate, without Kate lowering the book to a 4. Kate sounded so stupid when messing up sayings. She needed more of a personality than that.
But other than that, the book was really good. The atmosphere was cozy, the food was good, and the mystery was interesting. And because I love Annabelle so much, I will definitely read the next book of the series. |
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| "cute first novel and friends" | 2007-02-01 |
| - Reviewed By 4fabfelines |
this is a cute first novel and the friends Annabelle has keeps it interesting.
I would buy the second one in the series too.
Cute fun easy read.
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 "Cozy Mystery For Older Readers" | 2006-08-30 |
| - Reviewed By la_librarian |
This cozy-type mystery has some good points: it's got an interesting hook because the "detective" is a wedding planner and it's a fast read if you are pulled in enough by the story to not put it down. I unfortunately thought the book was really ho hum.
The first major downfalls is the sidekicks - the gay caterer friend who is the textbook drama queen, the friend Kate who messes up every saying (that people do not use in normal conversation today) in a really dumb way, like saying "a bird in the hand is worth two bushes" instead of "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." Another time Kate says she'll "hold down the fork" instead of "hold down the fort." It was really corny and not funny at all.
The second flaw is that the major part of the story is Annabelle/Richard/Kate questioning people, almost getting in trouble, and the nosy neighbor showing up trying to play detective too. The sort of love interest is the real detective who, other than being hot, isn't that interesting and has no personality. He seems amused at Annabelle but isn't that dramatic.
I didn't finish the last few chapters because I just didn't care if the killer was caught, I didn't care about Annabelle enough and I'm not sure why, maybe because her friendships all seem superficial. It seems like this story is a cozy mystery but is marketed as a chick-lit type mystery. It would have been way funnier if all the characters were about forty years older and it was marketed as a cozy mystery for older readers. The young women reading this will want juice - hotter stuff going on with the detective, more cutting edge wedding industry fashion, less goofy sayings, less Matlock type detective work.
Still all in all I may try one more just to see because others reviewers seem to rave... |
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