Murder in Paradise {Book Review} ⋆ An Ordinary Gal

Books, books, books! It feels so good to be reading again! I’m not sure if it’s the excitement of chasing my Goodreads total, or I’ve just enjoyed the last few books that I’ve read….. I find when I struggle with a book, it takes me weeks to read….and I can’t start a new one until that one is finished. That one is boring though, so I don’t want to read it, but I have to finish it to start a new book. A vicious cycle….. Today’s book is guilty of pausing my love for reading. Yip….Murder in Paradise.…you almost murdered my love for reading….. Let me tell you why!

I featured this book in a recent #CurrentyReading post I did in December, so this may look familiar to some of you…..

What is Murder in Paradise about?

THE LAWYER LIFEGUARD with Doug Allyn: Defense lawyer Brian Lord survived the car bomb that killed his fiancée. Out of work and out of his mind, he takes on a lifeguard job at the beach. But there’s one wave he’ll never see coming…

THE DOCTOR’S PLOT with Connor Hyde: Abi Brenner is the new medical examiner in the Napa Valley, a dream job in a dream location. But her fairy tale will take a terrifying turn when she uncovers a series of murders –with one sinister thing in common.

THE SHUT-IN with Duane Swierczynski: Confined to a studio apartment, Tricia Celano watches the outside world through a flying drone. But when her high-tech toy records a vicious murder, she’s determined to track down the killer –a killer who knows she’s being watched.

Three Books

What I love most about this book, is that it’s 3 short stories in one. So it feels great to know you’re going to get the thrill of THREE books, all in one condensed little book.

The Lawyer Lifeguard

When I started this book….I thought, hmm…this looks and sounds interesting. That feeling lasted for all of 2 very short chapters. The was just so hard to read…there were too many characters for such a short story. The plot was just so far-fetched…. a lawyer, Brian, loses his fiancee’ in a car bombing, survives it himself….. then becomes a lifeguard. I mean…really? I don’t want to give too much away, but if I was just almost blasted to death, I’d wait more than 2 days to try out as a lifeguard. Surely there’s a grieving process?

The end….it all just happened so fast and again, so far-fetched. I eye rolled through the end. This was my least favourite story in the book. The fact that it took me 2 months to finish the story, is a testament to how much I did not enjoy it. I almost never read again, because I just didn’t want to push through this story.

The Doctor’s Plot

Here’s where the book started improving. Immediately….I couldn’t stop reading. I felt better knowing this wasn’t an awful book, just the first story was bad!

Abi is a the new Medical Examiner in town and things immediately are just not right. I just wanted to know what was happening and I wanted Abi and her husband to just kick ass and defeat the bad guys. I need to mention…in my mind, these characters are Elizabeth and Tom Keen from The Blacklist. lol. So they had to kick ass! The story line was interesting, and it felt really dark and sinister, maybe a bit too sinister. There were also quite a few characters in this story, which makes things difficult for me…to get to know 10 plus characters within 80-100 pages.

The ending was unexpected and I felt a certain way, but it made for entertaining reading.

The Shut-In

Did they save the best for last? I think they did…. The Shut-In was the best story of the 3 for me. Tricia Celano doesn’t leave her house, due to an extreme allergy to the sun. She has a hobby to keep her occupied….a drone…that she uses to view the city and the outside world. She witnesses a murder one day and she gets involved in trying to solve it…but the killer knows they were spotted….so it’s a cat and mouse game to the end! Who will survive?

This was definitely the best story of the 3. There were a lot of twists and turns that I did not see coming. Also, there were not too many characters, so we could get to focus on the 2 most important characters…Tricia and the killer.

Overall thoughts

This book is great to grab if you are heading to the beach, or you’re looking for something quick and easy. I don’t feel this was the best writing in the world and it was reminiscent of another James Patterson book I didn’t enjoy, with regards to how fast paced everything was. Things move faster, there are a lot of characters to get through…for some reason, I don’t enjoy that sort of story telling. I’ve said it before, I like to get comfortable with a plot and characters.

The book scores an average rating of 3.5/5 on Goodreads and retails for around R175, available from all leading book retailers. My rating would be around 3 as well, so I think that’s fair.