Real Murders

By Charlaine Harris

Summary:  a series of killings patterned after celebrated murders is perpetrated on the small community of Lawrenceton, Ga. Twenty-eight-year-old Aurora (Roe) Teagarden, professional librarian, belongs to the Real Murders club, a group of 12 enthusiasts who gather monthly to study famous baffling or unsolved crimes. As a meeting is to begin, Roe discovers the massacred body of a club member. She recognizes the method of slaughter as imitating the very crime she was to address that night–suddenly her life as armchair sleuth assumes an eerie reality.[from Publishers Weekly https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-8027-5769-2]

Group Reviews

Thumbs Up: 5
Thumbs Down: 11

Comments from those who didn’t like it:

• Very much “chick lit”
• “She’s a TV writer, bless her heart,” said a reader, damning with faint praise.
• “The only redeeming grace was the book’s brevity.”
• Relationships incredibly simplistic.
• Writing, plot, character, all was so very juvenile!
• Poor writing, with lots of “telling not showing.”
• Where was the motive?
• The process of deduction by the main character was very rudimentary to put it politely and non-existant to those who didn’t care about being polite!
• “The writing was painfully bad!”
• We all seemed to hate Aurora Teagarden and couldn’t stop making fun of her. She was nasty, judgy, and we really just didn’t like her at all. Also, she read as a 50 year old spinster, not the young woman she was written to be.
• There was no detecting, Aurora just stumbles over everything to move the plot forward.
• Since the readers pretty much hated Aurora, they also hated how everyone fell in love with her.
• Almost everyone commented on the the gruesomeness of the murders and how this was completely unwarranted in a cozy.

Comments from those who liked it:

• If you’re ok with chick lit, it’s ok.
• If you can accept Aurora for who she was, it was ok
• A couple people liked the idea of a “real murder” club.”
• One person who continued with the series says they get better.
• It was a good premise. (even many of the thumbs down crew echoed this sentiment.)
• It felt a very accurate/authentic in terms of portrayal of south–yes, you ARE a spinster at 28, etc.
• It was fun and funny.

Finally, our group has coined another phrase.

Forevermore, when there is no motive apparent in a novel, we can simply say, “Orphan/presbytarian.” (Trust me, you had to be there.)