Cheryl R. (Spuddie) - , reviewed on 2/11/2010 + 412 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 1

#1 Roxy Abruzzo mystery, featuring modern girl Roxy, who is (for lack of a better description) an architectural scavenger by trade, gleaning what she can from the aftermath of fires, buildings set for destruction, etc. When the owner of a burned-out mansion ends up shot to death shortly after talking with Roxy at the site, she and her not-too-bright-but-muscley assistant Nooch are both being questioned by the cops. And since Roxy's uncle is big in the local Mafia, she's always learned to be leery of cops.

Besides, she did take a big statue that is apparently worth a lot more than she originally thought, and definitely wasn't on her approved list. Soon several family members and the family lawyer are trying to find the statue of Achilles, Roxy's getting shot at, and her uncle Carmine wants her to start "running errands" for him and sends her a wad of cash as an advance. Since her daughter Sage's school tuition is overdue, it's very tempting, but that situation is then complicated when Sage (who is seventeen) thinks she may be pregnant.

I finished this book, but mostly because it was a book I received to review. The writing style was easy enough to read, but it just wasn't that interesting to me--perhaps I'm older than the target audience because I just felt rather curmudgeonly reading about the over-sexed Roxy hopping into bed with every other guy she met, and yet somehow managing to be indignant when here daughter suspected she was pregnant. And really, I don't need repeated descriptions of her nice ass, steamy truck windows, and other cheesy sex scenes. I'm not a prude by any stretch of the imagination, but I intensely hate gratuitous sex and so-called romance. Bah.

Roxy, who I think was supposed to come off as a tough, independent, rebellious "modern" woman, just came off as a wishy-washy boring floozy. (OMG, I used the word floozy! I must be getting old!) The other characters (the book was told alternately from several different POV) were equally inane--the crooked family lawyer trying to work an angle to retain the most money, the anorexic, Xanax-popping artsy-fartsy niece of the dead man, the jilted ex-wife (who is the one who burned down the house when she caught her husband with a barely-legal pop tart) and so on.

I couldn't get interested. I didn't really care whodunit. This is the first book I've read by this author and unless someone actually pays me to read another, it will be the last.

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