Goodbye Ginny Madison

a fuller version of this appears at my blog, The Irresponsible Reader.

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This just didn't work for me. It was cute enough, I guess – and the solution was pretty clever (although I saw the heart of it very early on). But at the end of the day, it just wasn't well-written. I'm getting ahead of myself a bit.

You can get the gist of the book from the Publisher's Description here on Goodreads. Sounds like a straight-to-DVD Rom Com, doesn't it?

Greg, simply put, is a chauvinist. Mystery novels are “real ‘guy's' books” and no guy should come anywhere near a romance novel. He's doing well enough writing full-time under a nom de plume to afford a nice house for himself and his uncle, which can't be easy. Yet, somehow, someone who thinks, “I mean what the hell does a guy know about romance? Beer, sports, guns. That's guy stuff. Romance; female stuff.” Can write well enough for a female audience to support himself, despite a lousy work ethic. I guess it's the Melvin Udall-phenomenon. He's really pathetic, professionally and personally – if not for his uncle, it'd be easy to see him holed-up in his house forever.

Uncle George is a fire-cracker of a guy, pushing Greg into the world by any means necessary. Beyond his healthy nest-egg, poker buddies and bookie, he has a pretty full life on his own – think Stephanie Plum's Grandma Mazur, but more together and grounded.

Hattie? Hattie's a fantasy come to life – a knockout who can drive, shoot, take down bad guys with a couple of martial arts and cook. Did I mention she was hot?

And these are the well-drawn characters. The murder suspects are stock characters, as are the mobsters that Greg runs into. The police detectives are worse.

I really don't want this to turn in to a litany of complaints, because I've really covered the major ones already, but I do have a few more, that I'll just list without too much expansion:
* The samples of Greg's writing are, like almost every fictional example of someone's fiction, are over-written. More adjectives and adverbs than any published author would use, lousy dialogue, unnatural vocabulary choices. This tendency occasionally spills over into the narrative, too.
* Gehrke seems incapable of writing out the words “Lieutenant” and “Sergeant.” Sorry, man, but only using abbreviations? That's just lazy.
* Along the same line – this thing is just riddled with typos. Most are forgivable/easy to ignore. But there are some that are just nasty. If Gehrke got “losing”/”lose” right once, it slipped by me. Sure, it seems minor – but if you have to re-read the sentence because the wrong word (i.e., “loosing”/”loose”) was used, it takes you out of the moment.
* Greg, George and Hattie spend so, so, so much time bantering about their choice of words in conversation it gets annoying. If he used that joke maybe one-third (or less) as often as he did, it could be amusing. But he just goes to that well too often, and it's off-putting.

The murder mystery itself was well done. The steps that Greg and the rest went through to solve it were pretty rambling and chaotic – but they were supposed to be. The tone was generally right – except when he wrote the same joke 15 times.

Cute enough, like I said, and pretty amusing. It's the literary equivalent of the straight-to-DVD Rom Com I mentioned earlier. Goodbye Ginny Madison is entertaining enough to justify the time – just entertaining enough. Still, if you're looking for novel about a rookie detective on his first murder case, check out Jim Cliff'sThe Shoulders of Giants