'Virtually Scared To Death' by Gillian Larkin

 

     About the book: "Julia Blake runs her own cleaning business. The first time she sees a dead body is when she discovers one of her clients, Mark Castle, lying dead on the floor of his luxury apartment. Julia soon suspects that Mark was murdered. He was a good friend and she is determined to find out who killed him."

     My Review: 

     I liked this short murder mystery. It was fun! There were technical problems, mostly to do with punctuation that did throw me, but I was able to get past it. At one point in the story, Julia Blake became ‘Ms Devlin’ and obviously that threw me, too.

     There wasn’t a lot of description and I liked that. I never got lost in a scene and I don’t really care what every single person looks like so it worked well for me. We could get to the action quick and without a loss of understanding.

     When Julia comes across the dead body and the police show up, it was a bit awkward with the inspector immediately claiming it was murder, without examining the death scene. Another character, and Julia herself, automatically jump to murder with no evidence to back it up. I would have liked this part to be a little slower, for the characters to organically come to the conclusion that it was murder – but that’s my preference.

     One thing that might not have worked - Julia figures out whodunit and then keeps it from us. It didn’t bother me too much because it’s revealed quickly afterwards.

     The story went a bit too fast for me! But that only goes to show how much I liked it. I’d have loved to sink my teeth into the mystery!

     I’m giving Virtually Scared to Death four stars despite the issues I’ve mentioned because I thoroughly enjoyed Julia. She was fun to follow around.

     Note: I found this short story for free at Smashwords. I'm not sure if it's free during the sitewide sale or if it's always free. Either way, don't wait. Go get a copy for yourself right now! (I must admit, I don't know that I'd spend $1.99 (next book) for such a short story and for the punctuation issues I mentioned above but that shouldn't prevent you from checking it out and making a decision for yourself.)

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