"SWEET REVENGE" by Diane Mott Davidson (C)

This is Diane Mott Davidson's 13th novel about the irrepressible Goldy Schulz, the thoughtful and sometimes wisecracking wife of a cop who always seems to be around when the bodies start to pile up. Food junkies might love this detective story about a woman who is the preeminent caterer of a small Colorado town west of Denver. Since she is always catering affairs for rich swells, she always seems to be on the scene when a murder occurs.

I was initially interested in Goldy and her story. The writing is reasonably captivating, or so I thought at the start. The conversations seemed to ring true and natural, and the people are all mildly interesting. I plowed on, waiting to be hooked, but I am sorry to say that the hook never came. This was one of those books which the more I read it, the more it went downhill.

Davidson's writing style ends up droning on and on. In addition, this book suffers from having chapters that are interminably long. This is a fatal flaw and it shows the author's propensity to wander away from the subject at hand as well as her desire to cover too many peripheral subjects. I learned more than I ever wanted to know about everything but the crimes being committed.

Goldy Schulz is written as a typically nice person who is normal in every way as a businesswoman, mother, and loving wife to her second husband. Davidson gets in so much detail and chit chat about her life that the crimes become a very small adjunct to her career. This book is all about Goldy's lifestyle with the result that the crimes are lost in her many recipes. She is always prepping this and prepping that and meeting with her clients. I felt like I was reading a cookbook or a mother's manual.

Between preparing and cooking all of these meals, doing the same for her family, and providing these services for all of the people from whom she wants to wheedle information, there is hardly any time for the murder mystery. Goldy is a loving mother to her young son, Arch, and she also somehow finds the time to be a loving wife to her second husband who just happens to be the chief homicide investigator for Aspen Meadows.

I decided to hang on to the bitter end and finish the book, but it was not a pleasant experience. This book is so boring that I couldn't wait to be done with it. As I later told my wife, I finished reading this book for the sole reason that the experience of reading it made me appreciate all the more the many other private eye novels that I have recently read.

Part of me wonders if this is a book that might appeal more to women. I felt somewhat guilty that I just wasn't "getting" this book, that I just wasn't connecting with the story. Maybe it was my fault that I was, like they said in "Sex in the City," "just not into it" with its womanly outlook and direction. Maybe my lack of interest was really because I am a man and I just can't identify with a woman as both the author and the protagonist of a detective novel.

Maybe, that is, until my wife read the first few chapters of this book and refused to go any further because she was bored out of her mind. She is harder on books than I am, since she will not waste her time on a novel that does not quickly capture her interest. So, there you have it. Nice and normal makes for boring reading. And to think that this author has come out with thirteen of these novels. I sure hope that the other ones are better reads than this one. Well, different literary strokes for different folks.

I selected this book on the strength of it being number six on the New York Times best seller list of works of fiction. After wading through this book with considerable difficulty, I have to wonder how it got there. My only answer would be that maybe every library in the country, like mine, ordered a copy. I simply cannot see normal readers of detective fiction wasting their money on a book like this when there are so many other crime novels out there that are a far better read. So much for the NY Times being an arbiter of public taste.

It is now December, the snow is falling, and Goldy has 25 parties to cater before New Year's Day. We get to hear about a few of them, and the recipes for her specialty dishes are even offered as a bonus at the end of the book. In between all of the food preparation we find out that murder is also on the menu. Copyright 2007, Harper Collins, 332 pages.