When a glass-making competition turns deadly, glass shop owner Savannah Webb must search for a window into a criminal's mind…
As the new proprietor of Webb's Glass Shop, Savannah has been appointed to fill her late father's shoes as a judge for the Spinnaker Arts Festival, held in downtown St. Petersburg, Florida. With her innovative glass works, the clear winner is Megan Loyola, a student of Savannah's former mentor.
But when Megan doesn't show up to accept her $25,000 award, rumors start flying. And when Savannah discovers the woman's dead body on festival grounds, the police immediately suspect her of murder. To keep from appearing before a judge herself, Savannah sorts through the broken pieces of glass scattered around the victim for clues as to who took this killer competition too far…
My Thoughts :
I enjoyed the debut book in this series, Pane and Suffering, and was excited to get a hold of this second installment, Shards of Murder. However I felt this newest book in the series wasn't as exciting and interesting as the first. Or at least I remember being more impressed by the series the first time around.
At least one chapter was spent on Savannah training her dog and long explanations of glass techniques took up pages of space. Now the concept and theme is the glass angle but this time around it just didn't feel as interesting as the first time around. Also the one chapter from the Detective's perspective was nice but it was just a one time thing. I found this a little peculiar and was always waiting for more.
The characters are nice enough and the author has definitely tried hard to make them all different and have a lot of variety. Although some people may find she has tried too hard. The location comes across as a small arty town but I constantly feel like it is bigger. I am confused about how it should look and always get a surprised when I realise this is supposed to be based Florida. The author just isn't convincing me.
As plots go, this was pretty poor. The murder mystery was slightly boring and uninteresting. I figured out who it was straight away but just didn't know why. Actually the whole reveal was over so quickly you could have missed it if you blinked. The motive a last minute paragraph not long before the book ended. It was all quite anti-climatic and easy.
I am not sure if I will visit this series again. If I see a third installment I may check it out but there are many other good cozies out there and I need more reading time for them. I may be tempted...you never know. This could be a nice series but there seems to be a few kinks to work out here and there.
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