She Smiled Sweetly

Rating:
Summary: And I smiled along with her (when I wasn't being shocked)
Review: Back from a failed vacation, Poppy Rice is summoned by an Irish-Catholic fire marshall to look into a thirty-year-old death by drowning in Ireland. Poppy becomes entirely engrossed in the case when she recognizes the parallels between the Irish case and the case of an Irish-American girl who drowned in Boston just a year and a half before. Teamed up with Rocky Patel, a Boston homicide cop, for the American case, Poppy digs into the troubled history of the Boston girl, and unearths tragedies neither her family nor the elite community in which they exist want exposed. Strangely enough, a DNA match links the two girls, despite the time span and the distance between their deaths. Poppy uncovers a tale of child molestation, prostitution, and a Catholic sense of shame and faith.

Poppy is back in full-force, and the constant on-edge feeling the reading gives is more in-tune with the promise of the first book in the series, Love Her Madly. Poppy is a character who, though perhaps a little distant, is very open about her life and with her opinions. The book is so well-written that the reader, though puzzled about some of the things Poppy says along the way, comes to understand exactly what she meant. Tense, fast-paced, and witty, this is a series worth the time.

Rating:
Summary: Not nearly as good as I hoped it would be. . . as usual
Review: I checked this book out from the library for some summer fun reading. I've not read the first two books in the series, but the blurb made it look interesting and I am a true sucker for female detective fiction. I won't go into detail about the plot, but simply put it involves the drownings of two young women that take place thirty years and two continents apart. Poppy Rice, FBI Agent extraordinaire (apparently, since she doesn't seem to have to follow any standard FBI procedures)is asked to investigate both -the older one by a friend and his mother from Ireland and the more recent one by her boss (whose position at the FBI is never really defined). Her investigation leads to a web of incest, family cover-up, priestly misconduct and then . . . not much more.

It's too bad, because there were moments in this book where I was really interested. The incest plotline was compelling and the characters in the family were well defined. I wanted to know more about them and how they would handle the fallout. Unfortunately, the plot switched almost immediately to the priest and the pretty much unbelievable solution to the crimes - and the rest of the book is just a waste of time and words.

I used to think that you had to be really famous to publish a book without any input from an editor (Martha Grimes and Patricia Cornwell I'm talking to you!!). But now it is obvious to me that most editors must be asleep at the wheel.