|
[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
KNIT FAST, DIE YOUNG, the second in Mary Kruger's knitting-themed series, certainly has plenty of atmosphere for the crafting crowd. Set almost entirely in a fictitious wool and yarn festival, it really captures the feel for the people, offerings, dust (in this case, mud), and artistic possibilities of these events. It's not so good at delivering the mystery, however. Felicia Barr, editor of the magazine Knit It Up! is stabbed to death with a knitting needle, clutching heroine Ariadne Evans as she dies. Because Felicia seems to be modeled on the editor from THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA, there are plenty of suspects, ranging from the pattern designers whose careers she had limited, through the assistant she was overworking, to the assistant she had fired and then had a public fight with barely ten minutes before the murder. The set-up is great. You have your suspects, and you have the equivalent of a locked room in the monsoon-like conditions that have kept the public away from the festival and the vendors and presenters huddled in their separate barns. But then it all goes south. Like so many cozy authors, Kruger can't figure out how to get the police out of the way of her private investigator, and so starts bending reality and disbelief in a few directions that they just can't bend. There is little reason for Ari to meddle aside from the fact that it's her series and one of the local cops is sweet on her from the first book. He spends too much time looking at her as a shining beacon and possible date and too little acting in a professional manner, urging the other local and state police to rely on her to an unusual degree. Worse, they all go along with it, allowing her to upstage the actual investigation with a "gather all the suspects in a room and monologue" j'accuse scene that even the characters call a "Perry Mason" maneuver. I could understand the police wanting to talk to Ari, as she was the last witness to see Felicia. I could understand them relying on her experience with knitting supplies to answer their questions about the murder weapon (an old-fashioned aluminum 5.5mm needle.) I didn't quite understand Ari going on and on about how knitting needles are too blunt and thin to make good weapons – blunt, yes, but any knitter has seen the 12 and 15mm monsters that look like vampire stakes with decorative tops. I'm a bit surprised that those haven't been used as murder weapons more often, personally! But I just couldn't tolerate a whole platoon of police deferring to Ari and her TV tactics simply because she was the heroine. That bugged me more than the improbable solution to the puzzle. Who is obvious. Why is completely out of left field. In short, KNIT FAST, DIE YOUNG has a great background for people who like knitting, but it's not so good for people who like tightly-knitted mysteries.
Reviewed by Linnea Dodson, June 2007
[ Top ]
QUICK SEARCH:
Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]
| 
