Working Stiff: A Mattie Winston Mystery

Loved this book. Great character development, interesting storyline and lots of laugh out loud humor. Looking forward to more from Annelise Ryan.

Working Stiff stars a nurse (Mattie) who has left her career in the hospital to become deputy coroner in a small Midwestern town. She has recently found her husband in a sexual tangle with another nurse (in the OR yet!), and is devastated. THEN the nurse who was with her philandering husband is murdered! Did her husband do it? She's worried because she saw them have a huge fight just prior to the murder. You'll need to be able to suspend belief (Are ORs clean? Can a person become Deputy Coroner without special training, Is it actually possible to lose your panties at a crime scene?...). But the book is fun, and there's plenty of comic relief (if you like slapstick), and a possible love development...Why IS Hurley taking Alison out to dinner? Fun and quick read. I hope this is the beginning of a Mattie series.

The novel opens with a heartbroken Mattie Winston R.N. recently estranged from her husband after catching him cheating with another nurse at the local hospital where they both work. Wanting to hide under a rug but needing income she takes a job as coroner's assistant, a position where she is guaranteed to be spared the stares of the masses. But fate is not content to dismiss Mattie from the public eye. Soon after starting her new job she unexpectedly reencounters her husband's lover, now deceased, the victim of a brutal murder. And Mattie's husband is the prime suspect. Knowing her ex to be a jerk but reluctant to see him as a murderer Mattie goes about accumulating evidence in the hopes of clearing his name. Along the way she finds out that hers is not the only scandal in town as she uncovers the hidden secrets of her co-workers and friends, people whom she thought she knew and understood. As the heroine was a practicing nurse and employed in an official capacity in the coroner's office she is granted greater credibility as an amateur sleuth. The reader can then gracefully suspend disbelief as the office in which she works acts surprisingly spare of protocol as they zip through what must actually be a rigid codified process of training new employees. Mattie is rather a loose cannon of the kind that I imagine, and hope, is quickly restrained in an actual police investigation. Playing it loose with police regimens I forgave since this is not a hard-edged mystery, instead meant for the cozy audience as shown by the slapstick/serious portrayal of Mattie herself. The comedy is funny and I enjoyed it but the serious aspects of her characterization never jived for me. So much time in the book is spent telling me that Mattie is emotionally devastated by her husband's cheating, but frankly she never seemed that into him. I never got the sense that they once shared a deep emotional connection, I never learned what exactly went wrong in their marriage, and at a time when she is supposedly healing a broken heart she is head-over-heels lusting over the chief police investigator. So is Mattie heartbroken or moving on? Was she deeply committed to her ex-husband or was he just an interlude? A closer adherence to the actual experience of divorce and infidelity would have deepened the novel, though that approach might have limited the racy bits. And there are plenty of them. So many that after a few chapters I began to suspect that the title is a saucy double entredre. The novel is a cozy marriage between one of the safely racy Harlequins and a reassuring "the bad guys get it in the end" 1970's TV mystery drama. Mattie Winston is part classic detective with her chutzpah and intelligence and part Carol Burnett as she endures mishap after misadventure. If you are a fan of cozy mysteries and tolerant of A LOT of sexual innuendo then you will probably enjoy the pure escapism this novel provides.

I loved this book. It is fast pace and funny. It has a little of everything, drama, romance, suspense. My kind of book. I love books that get to the point and don't drag on with boring fillers. I also want to be entertained and not bored to sleep. This book met all my needs. Kudos to the author.

She thought she had the perfect marriage and perfect job working at the same hospital as her husband Dr. David Winston as he was a surgeon and she is a surgeon's nurse. However Mattie Winston's world collapsed when she caught him with another nurse Karen Owenby. Without a word, she rushes home, packs her bags, and visits her best friend medical examiner Izzy, who gives her a home in his guest cottage and hires her; training her to be a deputy coroner. When Mattie learns that Karen is at the home she once shared with David, she cannot stop herself from peaking through a window. What she observes horrifies her as the pair argues heatedly until David throttles her. Later that same night, Izzy and Mattie are called to a homicide scene where a female corpse has two bullets in her head. The victim is Karen. Suspicion falls rightfully on David, but though she is angry and acrimonious with him and knows what she saw at their house, Mattie refuses to believe he would kill anyone. A second murder implicates David further as Detective Steve Hurley finds evidence hanging Mattie's soon to be ex at a time the cop and the trainee are attracted to one another and he realizes she should be a prime suspect as a betrayed wife. The story line is fast-paced from the moment that Mattie realizes her spouse is a womanizing cheat, but not a killer and never slows down as the heroine risks her life (to the chagrin of her boss and the detective) to catch the culprit. Fascinatingly though she is a WORKING STIFF as an apprentice deputy coroner, the enjoyable story line reads in may ways like an amateur sleuth as she has little experience on homicide investigations. Fans will enjoy Annelise Ryan's fun investigative tale, the opening act of a new series. Harriet Klausner