Murder on the Valentine's Day Express

February Fever by Jess Lourey (Murder by Month #10)

Goodreads Giveaway Win

Pages: 227 Genre: cozy mystery

Rating: 2.5 Star

Kindle Notes and Highlights (here you can see the gun scene)

When Mira's boyfriend, Johnny, gives her his untimely announcement that he's going to Oregon for an internship, she feels like her reality has been rocked. Until her well-meaning but eccentric assistant surprises her with a train ride to PI conference in Portland. All Mira has to do is endure the Valentine Train and then she gets to see her boyfriend again. And it's going well, until a winter storm stops them on the tracks, a woman in the next cabin is murdered, and the woman's husband and daughter are missing. Mira has to solve the murder and find the girl before everything goes wrong.

This book was fine. I won it in a Goodreads Giveaway that I entered without thinking, so I did unfortunately jump into book 10 without any prior knowledge or context. I can acknowledge the disservice that this does to the book in general, but unfortunately nothing about this book in particular makes me interested in actually going back and giving it the attention it might otherwise deserve.

Luckily, this book is very short and quick, so I was able to burn through it pretty quickly. Given that and the fact that I had gotten it for free, I didn't feel like I was wasting my time. It's not the best book ever, and maybe not to my tastes, but it was fine. I liked it enough. Unfortunately, in the second chapter there's a moment with a stunning lack of gun safety and child endangerment that almost made me stop reading. Why are we firing a gun into the library ceiling? And when a two-year-old wanted to play with the loaded gun, why did Mira seemingly go to ask if the kid could do so? And why, when asked to put the gun away in front of the child, did the person say no? This scene added nothing to the story other than reader anxiety, and had the circumstances been different, I think I would've stopped reading because of it.

Honestly, all of the writing was very strange. That stood out the most to me, but there were a lot of other quirks. I think it was an attempt to be funny, but it really just came across as juvenile and, honestly, kind of annoying. For example, Mira talked about her poop. Repeatedly. You know, readers don't have to know everything about the main character. Mira also had a serious case of Quirky Girl Syndrome, and she wouldn't curse. Watching a 29-year-old say phrases like "What the curse?" just felt bizarre.

This weird sense of humor also created a weird contrast between the narration and the events happening in the story. This book discussed a lot of dark things, but it all felt so unserious. Admittedly, I'm not the most familiar with "cozy mysteries" as a concept, so maybe this is just a matter of me not connecting to the genre. But it was very jarring to read about a child kidnapping on one page and then details about Mira's poop on the next. I think the book would've benefitted from a more intentional tone.

I also found the mystery itself to be pretty weak. The whole concept of this series is that Mira has found a new dead body every month for the last (now) 10 months, and it's become so recurrent that she is seeking her PI license. But she didn't really ... do anything. Outside of being in the right/wrong place at the right time, she never felt like an active participant in the investigation. Clues sort of just fell into her lap, and there was no opportunity for audience participation (which I always think makes a mystery better).

The ending was also very weak. The mystery itself had an unsatisfying conclusion, and there were many things that didn't get wrapped up. Whole characters got forgotten about, and the whole thing wrapped up way too quickly. The book wasn't very long, so I wish we could've spent some time building out the story a little more so that the ending could stand a little stronger. Honestly, it felt like the gags were more important than the story.

Mira herself was never very endearing. I'm curious how she is characterized throughout the rest of the series, because I found her very inconsistent. Sometimes she is awkward to a point of incompetence — seriously, as someone who is awkward and fails a lot of social interactions, I don't believe that any real people act like this — but then other times I'm meant to see her as this clever and thoughtful PI. Her personality was whatever the book required, and I never got a strong sense of who she was.

This book was just a little odd. While there are some things that I believe the book did get wrong, I am also willing to acknowledge that, at the end of the day, it's just not my cup of tea. Maybe other people would enjoy this style more, and if they do, that's great. But I think I'm okay moving on from this book.