Fat Free and Fatal

Many of the ingredients of this book sound promising. Readers of the series know that Savannah Reid, the SPOV private eye heroine, is a crusader against weight bias. She was fired from the San Carmelito police force for being overweight, has ten siblings back in Georgia, and is helped in her detective agency by her cute skinny blond factotum and two male gay friends. Her other friends and sometime collaborators are Dr Liu, the female medical examiner, who is gay and chocaholic, and Dirk the trailer-dwelling cigarette smoking slob cop. A Goth wannabe sister from Georgia intrudes. Some of the sexaul relationships are ambiguous. In this one she is hired as a bodyguard for a movie actress whose star began to fade when she gained weight, and who has undergone ill-advised stomach surgery, and whose personal assistant has been killed. In spite of all those promising premises plausibility is thrown out of the window. Each time you start to believe in the story another impossibility is thrown in. At times is seems that McKevett is deliberately writing parody, a spoof on the conventions of the romance novel, She goes off into these lush cliché-ridden passages at times when it just seems she might be building up a decent plot. Inside Mckevett there's a good writer trying to get out, but the hatches are firmly battened down every time that begins to happen. Maybe she sits at home reading Updike and William Trevor and churns out these things to pay the bills. I suspect she's happy with the audience she aims at and aspires no higher. I'm sorry if that sounds snobbish. I mean it's ok to like romance novels and it takes talent to write one but readers expecting something along the lines of Sue Grafton might be disappointed. Kinsey Milhone, Grafton's Californian coastal town ex-cop female private eye is a much more complex character and those books contain carefully crafted plots and sophisticated irony.

The Savanah Reid series is fun, casual reading. Her character is flawed, yet intelligent and endearing. She's the girlfriend we all wish we had. I've read about half of the available paperbacks, and I've loved every single one.

This is one of a series which is fun to read. The characters are interesting, the plot is convoluted, and the final denouement is a big surprise.