Monday, January 21, 2019

Review: Stage Fright by Helen Smith



Genre: Cozy Mystery

Description:

“When amateur sleuth Emily Castles joins a community theatre project in Edinburgh, she begins to suspect that she has been recruited by a cult. When a fellow performer goes missing, she must risk her life to investigate…”

Author:

“Helen Smith travelled the world when her daughter was small, doing all sorts of strange jobs to support them both - from cleaning motels to working as a magician's assistant - before returning to live in London where she wrote her first novel.”

Appraisal:

This is the sixth book in Helen Smith’s cozy mystery series featuring Emily Castles. Like all of Ms Smith’s books, there are interesting and quirky characters with subtle humor spread throughout the story.

The setting for this story is especially interesting when Emily finds herself living and working with a community theatre group where things seem a bit off. Then a body turns up and Emily does her thing, trying to figure out what happened. All the words like different, unique, quirky, and unpredictable that I’d normally pull out to describe one of the previous books in the series would apply to this one. If you’ve read and liked the previous cozies featuring Emily, you’ll want to read Stage Fright too. If quirky cozies are your thing, this is a good place to start. If you think I need to find some good alternatives to use instead of the word quirky over and over again, I’m open for suggestions. The possibilities listed in the thesaurus are too pedestrian. Not quirky enough.

Buy now from:            Amazon US        Amazon UK

FYI:

Uses UK spelling conventions.

Format/Typo Issues:

No significant issues.

Rating: ***** Five Stars

Reviewed by: BigAl

Approximate word count: 60-65,000 words

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