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Josie Marcus has a job many women only dream of – she gets paid to shop. As a mystery shopper, it’s her job to visit stores, make purchases and write reports about her experiences. When she receives an assignment to evaluate an employee, Mel Poulaine, at a fancy shoe boutique, everything seems routine. She’s been told that several women have complained about this man, so she’s on hyper alert for any inappropriate behavior. Something seems a little off to her, but there’s nothing specific she can point to in her report. That is until she catches him in the backroom with her Pradas. When Josie’s report reaches management, Mel is immediately fired. And then he’s murdered. Josie’s a single mom and her mother has helped her raise her daughter Amelia, who is now nine. Their home is next door to a nosy woman named Mrs Mueller who has spied on Josie since she was in elementary school. Mrs Mueller is also the mother of a former classmate of Josie’s named Cheryl. Cheryl’s been held up to Josie as the perfect person, someone Josie can never aspire to be, her whole life. Now Cheryl’s leading the life of the upper middle-class suburban mom, complete with an accountant husband and a fancy new house. But when the police show up on Cheryl’s doorstep to talk to her about Mel’s murder, suddenly the tables are turned and Mrs Mueller begs Josie to help her daughter. Not only that, she offers Josie’s mom Jane the leadership positions in both the church altar society and the garden guild if Josie helps exonerate her daughter. Jane has always longed for the social acceptance that those positions symbolize, and she isn’t above doing her own begging so that she can get them. Josie takes pity on Jane and agrees to help. Cheryl isn’t willing to talk to Josie. She’s convinced that her own social standing will shield her from trouble, so Josie enlists her friend Alyce to help her with surveillance. Together, they follow Cheryl and discover she has more than one habit that could get her into trouble. And that she had both motive and opportunity to murder Mel. HIGH HEELS ARE MURDER is a light and sometimes humorous read. I have been a fan of Viets’ Dead-End Jobs mystery series since it started because I loved hanging out with the protagonist in that series, the hysterically funny Helen Hawthorne, and I was pleased to see a working-class woman sleuth. But I was disappointed in HIGH HEELS ARE MURDER. Helen Hawthorne, the sleuth in the first series, is a lighter spirit than Josie. Josie tends be pretty maudlin, repeatedly lamenting the mistaken affair that got her pregnant and resulted in her failure to complete her college education. There is little at stake. Why would Josie agree to help someone who has always dismissed and demeaned her on the flimsy pretext that her mother aspires to meaningless positions in the very suburban institutions Josie criticizes? There are two murders in the book and even these are committed in exactly the same manner. HIGH HEELS ARE MURDER is also rife with moralizing. I couldn’t help but think that Viets must have been very cranky all the while she wrote it. We wade through rants on many subjects. Cheryl’s a gambler, and Josie unloads on the casino industry with both barrels. Shoe fetishists, drug dealers and the shallowness of suburbia become fair game for her invective, as though diatribe could substitute for character development. Even misplaced apostrophes and motel bedspreads can’t escape her wrath. All of which could be funny, but isn’t, because we have no reason to care about or identify with any of the characters. A love interest whose activities are limited to “vaulting the counter” at the coffee shop where he works and kissing Josie soundly don’t make us understand Josie’s affection for him, so when he ends up disappointing her, it’s hard to understand why she would plunge into despair over the affair’s end. Maybe I’m just being cranky myself, but in my estimation, HIGH HEELS ARE MURDER is just plain sloppy writing. If you want to see what Viets can do, you would be much better served to pick up a copy of SHOP TIL YOU DROP, the first of the Dead End Jobs series. If you do, you will see that Viets really can write when she puts her mind to it.
Reviewed by Carroll Johnson, January 2007
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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