Book Review--Dating Dead Men, by Harley Jane Kozak

This is the first book in a new series starring Wollie (short for Wollstonecraft, if you can believe it) Shelley, a greeting card designer and amateur sleuth. I actually read the second book in the series first, but decided to review them in order. It's a good thing I read the second book first, though, or I probably would not have read on.

In Dating Dead Men, Wollie is concerned about the card shop she manages. If her shop is upgraded she can buy it. The shop also carries some greeting cards she designs, as well as cards from many other sources. Wollie is also involved in a "research" project. A radio talk-show host is writing a book, How to Avoid Getting Dumped all the Time, and Wollie is helping out with the research by dating 40 men in 60 days.

After receiving an urgent call from her brother Wollie is driving to see him at the state mental hospital (he's paranoid schizophrenic) when she stumbles across a dead body. She gets to the hospital and sees that her brother is all right and in fact, fast asleep. So she leaves, but if briefly taken hostage by a "doctor" who is on the run from the mob. Fortunately his only desire was to escape and not to harm Wollie, and by the time they have driven together for a ways, they have become friends of sorts. Wollie is worried that her brother, who somehow knew about the corpse before she came across it, is involved in the crime, so she tries to solve it herself rather than going to the police. This involves encountering some rather sinister types, to say the least. The dead body and "Doc's" run from the mob are connected, and Doc keeps trying to keep Wollie out of harm's way, which doesn't work because she doesn't take his advice.

Anyway, I didn't like this book as much as I liked the second one (which I will review in a later post) because I thought this book was confusing. It was just hard to follow in spots, and I am not sure if this is because of the writing, or if I kept getting lost because it failed to hold my interest. But like I've said, the second book is better, so I do think there is hope for this particular series.