|
Now that all the murder charges have been dropped, Haley Farrell can breath a lot easier. The grief of finding her best friend’s body still lingers, but her days are taken up with running the auction house she inherited as well as her new decorating business. Clients are lining up and passing her phone number around to their wealthy friends making life hectic, but good. That is until the day she finds out she has to work with contractor Dutch Merrill again and finds yet another body on the porch of her most recent client. Dutch gets the suspicion this time, though Haley struggles with seeing him as a murderer. When their paths keep meeting the two of them discover they have more common ground then they expected as they search for the real killer. Perhaps Haley already knows the suspect and won’t accept the facts.
Ginny Aiken has done a great job of capturing Haley Farrell as a slightly scattered decorator struggling to spruce up her life. Haley's emotional upheaval comes when details of the crime stir past experiences to the surface causing her foundations to shake. The characters are rich with emotion and reality. I love the eccentrics in the story who give more color than the fabrics with which Haley works. The grounding of her pastor father helps keep Haley’s feet firmly on terra firma bringing her back to her faith and love of God. You fall in love with Dutch even as you wonder if he did the things karate chop cop, Lila Tsu, accuses him of committing.
The mystery is well formed and played out. There are plenty of questions with answers coming in a believable way rather than being contrived. Haley’s gut instincts are good yet are backed up with solid evidence, usually after she’s formed her opinion. The hint of romance in the plot is just enough to keep a romance reader happily dreaming of book #3 with the hopes of a relationship developing. Humor mixed in with dark details gives comedic relief in perfect spots to relieve all the tension.
I loved the book. The pages kept turning from the minute I started. Ginny Aiken has developed the characters to a point of making them friends with whom I can’t wait to visit again. There is nothing improper in the romance which could be a hindrance, nor is there any objectionable language. The one thing which might cause hiccups with some readers is the detailed description of how the victim died and what was done to them. Also, there is talk of medical procedures in some detail, but it’s handled very well, in my opinion, and not done gratuitously at all.
I recommend “Decorating Schemes” as a great read for anyone from older teen on up through the adults. I would not recommend it for younger teens due to some of the content/situations being more than I would want a child of mine at that age reading.
I look forward to the next book in Ginny Aiken’s Deadly Décor Mystery series now that I’ve made a closer friendship with everyone in “Decorating Schemes”.
Reviewed by Allison M. Wilson
for The Road to Romance
April 7, 2006
|
