Synopsis/blurb....
'Six minutes is not long ... but it's plenty long enough to kill'
Sonia Deerfield is a talented performer just hitting it big in the music biz, a recent million dollar lottery winner and a beautiful woman. Lucky Sonia. Or is she? For someone among her nearest and dearest is out to get her. Someone is conduction a harassment campaign of threatening phone call, vandalism, minor accidents ... Helen Keremos, susceptible as ever, falls under the spell of the red-haired millionaire, and is persuaded to take on the case. Within days simple harassment explodes into murder. And Helen needs all her street sus to untangle the chains of intrigue which are binding Sonia.
A bit of a punt taken on this one in order to cover a hole in a Goodreads reading challenge, and probably not one of my more rewarding shots in the dark.
It sounds better than it was, and it doesn't sound that great to begin with.
A lesbian PI-cum-bodyguard, not someone I felt we got to really know during the course of the book, investigates threats to a singer, that I didn't feel any attachment to, by a load of friends, corporate types and general hangers-on, who just weren't particularly interesting.
Apart from that it was amazing!
Threats, lawyers, a recording studio trip, a bomb, the police, an ex-husband, a boyfriend, an unkindly uncle, murder, and possibly a fledgling romance on the cards.
I was kind of deluded into thinking because it was a relatively short read - 170-odd pages I'd cane it in a couple of days, when actually because I wasn't invested in the story it kind of bumped me right out of my reading and I kind of meandered through it, 10 or 20 pages a day, with little enthusiasm to switch onto another book.
The style of writing was ok, the Toronto setting was alright and there were a few genuine moments of excitement among a book I found to be relentlessly tedious.
2 from 5
Work For a Million is the second in the author's series of books featuring Helen Keremos. I believe there are six in total.Read - August, 2020
Published - 1986
Page count - 176
Source - owned copy
Format - paperback
That's just it, isn't it, Col? If you're not invested in a story, it's hard to stay interested. And if you don't care about the characters, why bother to stay invested? The premise sounds good, but if it didn't work out as well as you'd hoped, then I can see why you were a bit disappointed.
ReplyDeleteGlad I read it Margot, but sometimes you feel a bit of disappointment overall
DeleteI read this one, way back in blog early days, and you will be delighted to hear that I read it solely because I had featured no authors with names beginning with Z on the blog! I was unimpressed too, I said 'the heroine has seen it all before, and so has the reader' and that it read like a mashup of every feminist 80s crime story.
ReplyDeleteBy now I have featured a massive five books with authors in the Z section..
Nice to know we are on the same page as each other with this one Moira. You're ahead of me on Z authors I reckon. Maybe I've got 3, my back-filling is still incomplete, but I have the ammunition to catch up..... Frank afiro, Julie Zeh, Bruce Zimmerman, here I come!
Deleteafiro... Zafiro
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