Member Reviews
This was a cute cozy mystery. Some of the editing should have been better, but I was able to enjoy this cozy mystery, set in Sonoma, wine county.
A couple of dead bodies, a guru, a psychic and so much more in Seven Deadly Zins.
I volunteered to read and review an ARC of this book provided by the publisher and NetGalley.
Yay another cozy mystery involving Taylor and her off the beaten path wine tours! I have to admit that the wine country mysteries have some of my favorite characters. This is the second book in the series and I do recommend reading the first one.
Taylor and one of her groups discovers a dead body in a vat of wine. Luckily, Taylor is not considered a suspect this time. Unluckily, her good friend Tim is. Taylor decides to help clear Tim’s name. During all of this there is a new rival wine tour business, a guru who is all the rage, and did I mention a second dead body?
I love this series!
A fairly standard cozy mystery, but with a great setting and very interesting characters. Very well written and a GOOD READ!
Title: Seven Deadly Zins
Author: Nancy J. Parra
Genre: Mystery, Fiction, Wine,
Plot: Taylor O'Brian lives in Sonoma County with her aunt at her aunt's vineyard and she has her own business where she arranges tours of vineyards and other interesting sights in her local district. She used to be in advertising in San Francisco but this new chapter in her life seems to suit her considerably better.
That is, until a body is discovered at her friend Tim's vineyard while she is conducting a tour there. Convinced that Tim is innocent, Taylor and her friends team up to clear his name but the mystery deepens as they unearth clues and Taylor begins to wonder just what kind of man her friend really is.
Likes/Dislikes: I loved the cover, the promise of recipes and the idea of a wine themed murder mystery to curl up with. But unfortunately for me, the first couple chapters weren't interesting enough to draw me further in. We get plopped in the middle of a wine tasting room with several characters thrown in and interested fairly well, followed immediately by a seance. I don't do seances. I skip them on TV shows and skim read them in books. And the writing style is first person which is always hard for me to read. At least its not first person present tense. Oh well. The author has numerous other mysteries so maybe one of those will be more to my liking.
Rating: PG-13 and up, it's a murder mystery.
Date Review Written: August 27th, 2018
I received a copy of this book courtesy of Netgalley and wasn't required to write a positive review. the opinions expressed in the above review are my own.
A strong second installment to what is proving to be a great series! I love how there is always action in this story. It gets right to the point of the mystery, but still has enough details to keep it interesting for the reader. The characters are well developed and as the reader learns more and more, they can't help but be sucked in by the characters and the story. I cannot wait to see what else the author has in store!
This was probably the first cozy mystery book I've read (if we don't count Agatha Christie's books) so I don't have a clear idea of some standards I could use to compare it against but I think that this book has some pretty big flaws. With that said, I didn't have a bad reading experience with it - on the contrary, I quite enjoyed most of it. I can see myself reading a lot more cozy mysteries in the future because I certainly enjoy the cozy atmosphere, over-the-top colorful covers and mysteries softened by a light tone.
At several points during reading Seven Deadly Zins, I felt like it needed quite a lot of edits and some scenes rewritten, but also a beta reader for some big-picture issues. There were pretty obvious time inconsistencies and some of the dialogues didn't make much sense. Speaking of the dialogues, they were generally quite weak. A good portion of the book is just characters asking each other if they are ok and filling each other in on stuff we already know. A lot of it could have been skipped and I would rather learn more about the characters and their thought process instead of reading tons of banal conversations.
This is the second book in this series and I haven't read the first one (with my current access to books, it was either this cozy mystery, or no cozy mystery, so I went for it, although I usually like to read series in order) but the characters felt really flat and I didn't learn much about the main character, Taylor. She was a bit annoying, though.
Another thing I didn't like was that the plot and the explanation of the mystery were super far-fetched. Also, I don't know if this is a popular trope in cozy mysteries (it would make sense to some extent), but the way the police were described as absolutely incompetent and ignorant felt a little overdone and implausible.
So I have quite a lot of reservations but the truth is that despite all of them, it was still a fun and cute read and I wouldn't be opposed to reading more books from this series. It might be because I don't have much to compare it against but from my current perspective, it was a 3-star read.
This is not really a review but I hope the publisher reads this. I just started this book and there are three errors in it so far. Or maybe inconsistencies.
The character Holly is a vegan yet she eats an egg salad sandwich. Vegans eat no animal products.
It says Tim met Mandy on an online dating site but then a couple chapters later it says he picked her up at the steak house.
Finally, Mandy says she too Dr. Brinkman’s seminar which cost $1000 and she says Tim paid for it. Taylor says something about Tim peeling off five one hundred bills.
I know this is an ARC but it needs to be edited before publication.