BOOK REVIEW: Clammed Up, by Barbara Ross (A Maine Clambake Mystery)

I love cozy mysteries. Like most avid readers, I read a lot of different kinds of books, but I have a guilty-pleasure favourite genre. I adore a good paperback murder that has an amateur sleuth snooping around her small town looking for clues and handing out recipes. Ooh how I love them! And because I love the genre so much, I'll usually put up with a lot of the mediocrity that comes with genre fiction (by that I mean that even though there are many, many great examples of the genre, there are inevitably also many less successful ones...and I love most of them just the same).

With Barbara Ross' Maine Clambake series, however, no forgiveness is required. Her writing is stellar, right out of the gate. In fact, if someone who had never read a cozy mystery before asked me to recommend a book to introduce them to the genre, I might choose this one.

Barbara Ross understands everything that I love about fiction in general and mysteries in particular. First, her setting is a real place. I don't just mean that she set the book in a place that exists in real life (I don't care about that...fictional places are just fine), but that she describes it in a way that is so deliciously realistic that I feel I could walk down any street in her book and I would know exactly what it would look and smell like. She spends time on her secondary characters, giving them things to do other than just provide clues to the murder investigation (which is wonderful because some of them are hilarious).

I had actually started reading the second book in this series, Boiled Over, first but then was enjoying it so much that I decided to stop and read this one first. Because of that, I think it was a little easier for me to figure out "whodunnit" in this one. I'd recommend just reading them in order if you can. They're both heaven.

BOOK DETAILS:
Clammed Up
A Maine Clambake Mystery (Book 1)
by Barbara Ross
Published by Kensington
Publication Date: September 3, 2013
View on Amazon

Source: my local library


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