2 out of 4 stars
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Journalist Alma Jaramillo has her hands full after she agrees to help a friend locate the birth mother and biological twin brother of a spoiled runaway. Alma realizes she’s in hot water when the trail starts involving the girl’s insane, wealthy grandfather and the murder of a priest. With families trying to keep long buried secrets from seeing the light of day, Alma is forced to sift through a case where everyone seems to have an angle and some sort of connection to the tangled mass of lies. In addition to the mystery, Alma is also dealing with the possible defection of her boyfriend to his scheming ex-wife and a co-worker attempting to steal her place at work. It would be an understatement to say Alma’s life has gotten complicated.
Violent Delights by S. B. Urquidi is the second in the Alma Jaramillo series and is a solid effort plot wise. Unfortunately I could only give it 2 out of 4 stars. The main problem is that the text is in need of a good editor. I found constant grammar errors, particularly the use of commas. Sometimes sentences were so chopped up with commas it was hard to determine what was actually happening. There was also a tendency to use semicolons when there really should have been separate sentences. It wasn’t always that the punctuation was necessarily used incorrectly, but there was a serious lack of quotation marks that made all the commas very confusing with the dialogue even when the commas were used correctly.
There were a few secondary issues that weren’t necessarily errors, but still made the book a little less enjoyable. For one thing, the tense that the story was written in was awkward and didn’t really flow well. Another thing was that there were a lot of names to keep track of. I sometimes had to flip back and forth trying to remember who certain characters were. There was nothing technically wrong with either of these things, but they certainly did take me out of the world of the story.
What I did love about the story and what made me so disappointed in the editing is the fact that the author has used fascinating cultural facts and a different setting than most mysteries. I loved the Mexican culture that was ingrained into the story and I greatly appreciated the glossary that translates all of the terms used. The plot itself is very solid as mysteries go, and Alma is a likable character who behaves rationally, something not always present in mystery novel protagonists. The incredibly positive parts of the book are what made it so frustrating to have to rate it as low as I did.
Violent Delights has the makings of a good mystery novel, so it is unfortunate that the lack of editing is so glaring. Hopefully the author will get someone to help them polish their next story better because there is so much to like here, particularly in the multicultural aspects. We need more books involving other cultures and this one used its setting so well that I can only hope the author improves in the future.
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Violent Delights
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