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SOFIE METROPOLIS
by Tori Carrington
Forge, June 2005
288 pages
$21.95
ISBN: 0765312409


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Sofie Metropolis says she's not going to be a good girl any more. After catching her cheating fiancé on the day of her wedding she now no longer lives at home or works in her father's restaurant. She's working in her uncle's office as a private investigator and lives in the building her parents bought her. Her PI uncle is off on vacation and the investigative jobs she's getting are mostly cheating spouses and lost dogs. She's not so sure she wants to be a PI.

When her mother's best friend's dog never returns from his walk and the old man everyone in the neighborhood thinks is a vampire seems to have disappeared and is replaced by his equally vampirish nephew, Sofie is pressed into volunteering to look into the problems.

In the office Sofie thinks it's going to be yet another run of the mill job when a new client tells her to catch his wife cheating with her boyfriend. But when bullets suddenly start flying, the FBI gets involved, bodies go missing and a hunky mystery man keeps popping the hood of her car, Sofie's interest is hooked.

Invoking the name of Stephanie Plum constantly, in case you didn't get the idea that this book is a take-off of it, SOFIE METROPOLIS seems to have been written by following a recipe for a successful, modern female sleuth series. Unfortunately, the ingredients used in this particular recipe are second-rate. The hunky mystery man reads as smarmy, there's a lack of any feel for the Queens, New York location, no realism on the legalities of working as an armed, unlicensed, untrained PI in NYC is touched upon and there's a complete disregard for the reader's intelligence. Everything about SOFIE METROPOLIS misses the mark.

The writer of this book, Tori Carrington, is the pen name of Lori and Tony Karayianni, a husband and wife writing team. This is the first time they have dabbled in writing a mystery story and it shows. Other genres might permit the writers to play loose and slapdash with details, but mystery readers pay close attention to everything in a story because anything can be a clue. SOFIE METROPOLIS has shoot-outs and break-ins for no other reason than the need to include some action, lapses in logic and by the finish of the book, the side stories fall flat and little of the main case adds up.

More frothy chick lit than mystery, though its writers try hard to compare them, SOFIE METROPOLIS is no Stephanie Plum. Skip Sofie and read Stephanie

Reviewed by Sharon Katz, July 2005

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