Review of 'Baltimore Blues (Tess Monaghan, #1)' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Ms. Lippman might be my favorite "comfort read" these days. Nothing too splashy, but always engagingly written, with humor, pathos and charm, particularly when it comes to the "Battle of the Sexes".
But oddly enough, this is my first time with her series "detective", Tess Monaghan. Interestingly, she is just kind of falling into the investigation side of things just like Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum, which I recently reviewed A laid off newspaper journalist, she is struggling to find her way and decides to help out a friend who has been charged with murder.
Like all of her books, Baltimore Blues is filled with witty observations, especially about Baltimore and about guys. Tess has some real good "guy" friends and she loves comparing and contrasting. I particularly like the parts where she says stuff like "At least I believe that's how guys think".
The murder mystery is pretty good but …
Ms. Lippman might be my favorite "comfort read" these days. Nothing too splashy, but always engagingly written, with humor, pathos and charm, particularly when it comes to the "Battle of the Sexes".
But oddly enough, this is my first time with her series "detective", Tess Monaghan. Interestingly, she is just kind of falling into the investigation side of things just like Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum, which I recently reviewed A laid off newspaper journalist, she is struggling to find her way and decides to help out a friend who has been charged with murder.
Like all of her books, Baltimore Blues is filled with witty observations, especially about Baltimore and about guys. Tess has some real good "guy" friends and she loves comparing and contrasting. I particularly like the parts where she says stuff like "At least I believe that's how guys think".
The murder mystery is pretty good but to be honest, it just seems to go on a bit too long, with a bit too many things happening. Although for a change, I read it fairly quickly, I still lost track of who some of the characters were. And when there was a big reveal towards the end, I didn't really know even who it was! So the book is probably more of a 3.5 star book.
But that's not enough to keep from wanting to grab the next book in the series, [b:Charm City|474397|Charm City (Tess Monaghan #2)|Laura Lippman|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1339281362s/474397.jpg|462648]. I like the direction the character is going and I am interested to see her next steps. And seeing as there are currently 12 books in the series, it could be a good one to run through.