Movie-makers are making a movie in Jane's backyard. Jane is a mother of three children, and her best friend Shelley lives next door. Jane and Shelley are fun; I love their characters.
This book is focused on the movie making. The actors, extras, technical people, camera people, the nurse, the assistants, etc are all in Jane's back yard, going from the makeup trailor, to the coffee urn, to all the other important places. Films are rolling.
This 3-star rating is the exception - not the norm. Normally, I love these books. This series is so fun. I just love Jane and Shelley, their wit, and their adventures.
But I could not get into this book. All that movie making, to me, was boring, repetitive, tiresome. I despise movies and movie-making, but even if I did like it, I don't think I would have liked it in this book, because it was just too boring.
"A Farewell to Yarns", "War and Peas", and "Grime and Punishment" were much better. I actually enjoyed those books, and felt the atmosphere was cozy and the plot was clever.
But this movie making in the backyard, to me, wasn't an adventure. It was just boredom. It was very annoying. Don't get me wrong, the book wasn't all bad, and the plot was clever and good. It was just wading knee-deep through all that movie making before you got to the clever ending. (I like books that are fun WHILE you are getting to the clever ending.)
This book wasn't bad. It was average. Not the usual 5-star read that most of the books of this series is. |
Jane Jeffry, Shelley Nowack, and the rest of their neighbors are thrilled that a Hollywood movie is being filmed in the field behind their houses. Initially they enjoy meeting actors such as Lynette Harwell and George Abington as well as director Roberto Cavagnari. They also enjoy the glimpses into what goes on behind the scenes of a major movie. But Jane and Shelley soon find out the truth behind the glamour - Lynette is totally spoiled, thinking only of herself and not noticing or caring who she hurts as long as she gets her own way. So when property master Jake Elder is murdered, Lynette barely seems to notice. But Jane does - her boyfriend Detective Mel VanDyne is in charge of the murder investigation and unless he solves the case quickly, he won't be able to go away for the weekend with Jane. So Jane, with Shelley's help, begins to question the actors and others on the set, not only to solve the murder but also to find out who trashed her kitchen. And when there is a second murder, and Jane is now a suspect, she has even more incentive to find the killer.
"A Knife to Remember" by Jill Churchill is a nicely done cozy mystery. The movie setting is a lot of fun and a nice change of pace from the other Jane Jeffry mysteries. The behind the scenes look into the movies was very interesting. The various actors and their personalities add a lot to the book, especially the spoiled Lynnette and the people working behind the scenes in the movie, notably nurse Maisie Valkenberg, Lynette's devoted helper Olive Longabach, and Jake's assistant Butch Kowalski. Jane is a fully developed character at this point in the series, ready to move into a deeper relationship with Mel yet still capable of being hurt when she finds out about yet another of her late husband's indiscretions. Her worries over how to tell her children she is going away for the weekend with Mel is well written and very believable. One of the things I like best about this series is how well Churchill captures the aspects of family life especially Jane's struggles as a single parent and in dealing with her children, especially Katie, who is struggling with her hormones. There's a delightful scene in the book where Katie and Jane put their differences aside and work together to make clothespin dolls. Scenes like that are what makes this series so enjoyable. The mystery itself is well plotted, with plenty of suspects and I love the way Churchill gives Jane a legitimate reason for investigating the murder. As often happens in this series, the scene where the killer is revealed reads like something out of an Agatha Christie mystery. Finally, the very end of the book is sure to make readers smile.
"A Knife to Remember" is a great cozy mystery.
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A KNIFE TO REMEMBER provided a string of pleasant twists in the ending scenes, of which I had absolutely no clue, yet clues were clear and present. My first thought was, "HOW could I have missed all those hints." The answer followed quickly even as the question formed. I hadn't missed the hints. They were blatantly bombed into the plot. But! They were leading me through a formalized labyrinth, long established by this genre and others like it.
I had been set up by a mystery master who is so subtle she's nearly translucent.
As the final scenes skipped down traveled paths of anticipated heroine heroics, the ruts became ravines, and I fell in. Somewhat dreading the same ole heel skidding, I was forced to join the heroine's steps into danger's footprints. Exactly where was I? (If Jane's feet were in the footprints?) I don't know, maybe I was floating on a darkening cloud over Jane's head. Mystery denouements are supposed to put readers on the edge of their seats (or feet) aren't they? This conclusion did one better. Mel was involved.
That said, allow me to skip to a place before the beginning of this novel, to the situation of my procurement of this book. That true story touches the essence of appeal of this series, and links the uniqueness of KNIFE into the set.
For my copy of this special offering (# 5) in this series, during a pilgrimage trip with my husband this September, from Colorado to Portland, OR, I found a used-paperback, first-printing, at Powell's City of Books. Powells is housed within a whole-city-block, old-warehouse-building, and that magical bookstore helped me continue putting one foot in front of the other when I lived in Portland, at a difficult time in my early adult years, as I was edging too close to "bag lady." Now Powell's has six stores in the Portland area, its own web site, and is a vendor here on Amazon.
One of my reasons for mentioning that particular first printing is that its cover art felt like a gift, exposing the transition of this series (as was the case also with Sue Grafton's Alphabet mysteries and many others) from back-list mystery to a hot enough seller to begin designing the book cover around the author's name, instead of using gorgeous "oil painting" cover art, which used to be a hallmark of mystery novels. The current cover design for the Jane Jeffry series is gorgeous, too, with the stylized "C" in Churchill and the miniature-logo type graphics around cute cats.
But, I wish you could see the explicit kitchen scene painted in "Still Life" grandeur on my copy of A KNIFE TO REMEMBER:
The devilish-eyed, thick-furred, calico cat with tiger stripes is the focus. He is appealingly perched on a planked, wood-topped table, paused beside a basket of crisp chartreuse apples, with their plump roundness radiating a yellow glow off the pale green. Edged in front of the cat is a tipped-over canister, white with a black-checker-board design circling the top and bottom. A good portion of the kitchen is depicted in yummy detail and oil-painting-lush color. The other 3 canisters are distributed on an undisturbed counter behind the cat, surrounded by 1940's style, beige-painted cabinets, and what appears to be an antique-styled stove, a coal or wood burning imitation, modernized into a gas range sporting a copper tea kettle atop a burner, and a fry pan hanging on the white-ceramic-tiled wall of the stove's alcove. A large vase of a graceful, yet homespun flower arrangement is perched cozily beside the cat's hind end as his lifted paw trails flour dust. Of course the spilled flour has designed itself into a stretched skull's head.
This realistically-stylized oil painting is framed with a thin, hot peach border, and posed on the paperback's cover like a window, large enough for a viewer to easily drool over each artistic detail, with the whole picture taking up maybe two-thirds of the face of the book. The rest of the cover is a pleasant, perky purple, edged at the top and bottom in a thin checkerboard done in yellowish-green tones.
This is a scene worthy of a movie studio, from the days when sets were designed with an all-out detail doing one better than reality.
Maybe it costs a lot to have an artist render an oil painting based on the theme of a novel, for use on a book cover. If so, then why do books written by best selling authors so often get taken out of the hands of such artists and put into a simple, though jazzy, design using mostly the letters of the author's name? Yeah, okay, some of the hot selling authors's books are graced with postage stamp, theme-related-graphics squeezed inside the dot of an "I" in a letter of their names.
When you get to be 58 years old you'll know what happens to the eyes ability to see miniaturized details.
I'm sorry, but I miss the high art of an oil painting of a scene, mood, or theme of a novel. One of the appeals of Carolyn Hart's Annie and Max series is that Annie's bookstore has a contest for artists who paint pictures of scenes in mysteries, and the winner of the contest successfully matches each painted scene with the mystery it depicts.
Something about those older oil painting book covers said to me, "Linda, you can live inside the covers of this book; this story, for a while, can become your home. Come into my house and feel welcome."
Am I crazy or what? No need to answer that.
And how does the above diatribe relate to this particular mystery in which Jane has a movie crew set up in her back yard? Actually, the connecting thread is stronger than I might have thought, as my mind wandered off the point, again.
The main appeal of Jane's world for me, and for many fans, it seems, is that most of the plots take place around Jane and Shelley's neighborhood. Opening up any of the books in this series is like stepping into a familiar and comfortable second home, with friends who are fun and feisty to be around, yet who make no demands upon the reader other than to translate the printed words into his mind.
As far as the particular mystery in this one, compared to the others I've read in this series (see my Listmania and reviews), I would say that KNIFE seems to slide along with absolutely no reading resistance. As the fifth book in the series, this storyline seems to come off the press of an author who has become one with her characters, setting, and style. The relationships of Jane, Shelley, and Mel have been percolating long enough through the first 4 books to have slipped into an established rhythm which allows their sleuthing to move ahead like room-temperature butter spread over white Wonder Bread.
Not only that, the plot's evolution around the making of a few scenes from a movie was delightfully done, providing interesting, realistic-feeling tidbits about that industry, giving enough detail without boring a mystery reader into a documentary he wasn't psyched up for.
Of course a documentary is good when it's in a documentary.
Jane's ways of dealing with her kids, pets, Mel, and Thelma, working them into this backyard movie studio deal, are typical Jane. She dances through her days, adjusting an arrangement here, tweaking a problem there, discovering and releasing a devastating secret about her deceased husband, strengthening her relationship with her kids, increasing Mel's respect for her various skills and assets, all in a few week's work maneuvering around a movie set.
Well done, Ms. Churchill. In A KNIFE TO REMEMBER, you've provided effortless entertainment with thought munchies available if a reader pauses to ponder after the lights fade and the director calls, "CUT"!
Linda Shelnutt |
International Available
"Movie-making - Yuck"
"Enjoyable Cozy Mystery"
"Puns don't carry a story"