Ellery Adams

My heart sank when I noticed a stack of Ellery Adams' books; I had put them aside a couple of years ago to consider getting rid of them, but had not gotten around to it.  

I initially liked Adams' Books By the Bay series quite a lot; the central character, Olivia Limoges, is engaging, the members of her writing group are interesting, and the plots are reasonably well done.  However, as the series went on, the author began killing off some established characters, a practice I very much dislike.  I feel that if I'm going to invest any of my psychic energy into liking a character, that person had damn better well stay around and behave him or herself.  That's not to say that characters can't grow or change, or that secrets from the past don't cast long shadows into the present.  I'm in favor of all of that, but if characters are going to change their behavior radically, there had better be indications of it early on.  Again, I think this is a matter of fair play to the reader, because we tend to automatically eliminate from suspicion established characters unless there are legitimate reasons to suspect them.  

However, having said that, the author does a very nice job of developing the characters, especially Olivia Limoges as she discovers her convoluted parentage.   Now I'm glad that I decided to re-read all of the books instead of just letting them go. 

 The Books By The Bay series:

A Killer Plot--2010.  Introduces the central character, Olivia Limoges, an heiress with a troubled childhood and an aversion to commitment in relationships.  This book also introduces the members of her writing group and some of the residents of her small coastal North Carolina town.  The plot of this book hangs together well and the writing is good and moves right along.  Grade:  B.  

A Deadly Cliche--2011.  The book writers club helps the police chief decipher clues left at the scenes of several burglaries and two murders.  Laurel, a member of the club, is attacked.  Olivia finds her long-lost father, supposedly drowned thirty years ago.  Grade:  B

The Last Word--2011.  A famous author, writing a book about an escape of prisoners of war from a North Carolina POW camp sixty years before, is murdered.  Grade: B

Written In Stone--2012.  A local witch summons Olivia to her home in the swamp and hints that Willie Wade might not be Olivia's father after all.  During a regional food festival featuring members of a local Native American tribe, Olivia's sous chef is murdered.    Grade: B

Poisoned Prose--2013.  A regional storytellers' convention is held in town.  One of the storytellers is murdered, and the roots of the crime reach into the past as several people hunt for the treasure she supposedly possessed.   Grade:  B.

Lethal Letters--2014.  Olivia is present when a time capsule from 1910 is discovered in a local church.  Shortly thereafter a box from the capsule goes missing, and once again, the key to the mystery is found in the past.  Grade B.  

Writing All The Wrongs--2015.  At a coastal Carolina history conference held on an island very similar to Bald Head Island, a guest is murdered and an old friend of Olivia's is suspected of having killed her.  Grade:  B.    

Killer Characters--2017.  Olivia's friend Laurel catches her husband in bed with his mother's hospice nurse.  The nurse is subsequently killed and Laurel is suspected of murder. Grade:  C.

    I gave most of the books in this series a B.  They are well written and the characters are well developed, but I suspect that I will never read them again.  I get very tired of series that are set in one small town where, after a few books, half the town is in jail for having killed off the other half.  I also dislike cozy "Jep" or jeopardy plots, where a friend or family member of the central character is arrested or wrongly suspected of having killed the victim and is thus in jeopardy on fairly flimsy evidence.  It's an easy plot device, but it's a pretty tired one by now.    And, note to authors of "cozy" mystery novels--learn at least a little bit about how police forces actually investigate homicide cases and how the legal system works.  

The Book Retreat series:

Murder in the Mystery Suite, 2014.  The Book Retreat series is located in a resort dedicated to book lovers.  The first book in this series, Murder in the Mystery Suite, introduces the characters and the setting, a resort hotel or retreat center that has been taken apart, stone by stone and shipped from England to the Virginia countryside and comes complete with mysterious passageways, a dedicated staff and a secret library containing some of the world's rarest books.  As if this were not already enough to strain credulity, the central character manages to slap together in one day a week long retreat for lovers of mystery novels, during which a rare book disappears and a guest is murdered.  Seriously?  A secret society dedicated to protecting "knowledge" by keeping rare books hidden away from the entire world?  To me, that is withholding knowledge, not protecting or promoting it.  The premise of this series is just too silly to continue reading it.   I don't have any more of these, although I believe I have read at least one other of them.  Definitely not buying any more.  Grade:  C.