Kellye GarrettRecensioni

A good solid mystery. Very traditional, despite all the trappings of influencers,apps,online communications,etc.A fair number of red herrings and a bit of an exploration of race,identity and family.Everything you could ask for in a mystery

2.5 rounded up.

Kellye Garrett is a fresh and exciting voice in the mystery realm. In this novel, she gives us a naive protagonist who shuns ambition and has lived a stunted life ever since she was arrested after leaving a party and falsely accused of having weed in her car. With a criminal sentence in her background, she has given up on her dreams, until she meets a handsome, charming man who sweeps her off to a vacation in a luxurious Jersey City Airbnb, The neighbors are suspicious of the Black couple and are militantly searching for a missing white woman, with a TikTok influencer taking up the cause. Nevertheless, they begin to have a wonderful time traveling to Manhattan - though her boyfriend keeps breaking his promise to leave work behind. She's getting impatient with his furtive phone conversations until one morning she wakes up to find him missing and a dead white woman on the floor.

On the whole, I enjoyed reading this story, though I found the protagonist a bit hard to get to know, and her rapid-changing attitudes about her missing boyfriend was a little irritating (though not unrealistic). Toward the end, either I wasn't paying enough attention or there were some major plot holes. But the author's understanding of social media and her use of it in the story (as in Garrett's earlier Like a Sister) was intriguing.

I love Kellye Garrett and her writing. While this book is definitely different than her Hollywood Homicide books, it's still another great one. This audiobook is very well done and the narrator, Bahni Turpin, is talented. I always love listening to Bahni Turpin as the narrator on audiobooks and she did great with this one. She really brought the story to life, also the characters, and brought their personalities out, which added to the listening experience.
This story is a good one. It's a mystery/thriller about Lena Scott and her half-sister, Desiree Pierce is found dead. Lena becomes the unofficial detective in the case of her half-sister's death, which they claim is due to a drug overdose, but Lena doesn't think it adds up. As Lena starts to investigate, she finds more questions than answers to everything. Lena checking into things and trying to find/figure out what happened with Desiree brings out complicated family dynamics and relationships that have to be navigated to help figure out what happened. I love Lena and her character and this engaging and great thriller.
Thanks so much to Hachette Audio for letting me listen to and review this ALC. Make sure to check this out and give it a listen. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

This was a nice mystery that was a bit different from others I have read recently. I really liked the characters, who were mostly well rounded and multidimensional. I appreciated all of the twists the story took and the red herrings that were presented. My only criticism was at the end, I found myself confused about the motive of the crime. It just didn't make sense to me and I wonder if I missed something. Overall, a good mystery that I would recommend to those who like the genre.

Maybe too much Hollywood and I don’t care.

When Lena's sister Desiree is found dead, no one but Lena believes it is murder. Everyone thinks Desiree just died from excessive partying. Lena knows that it isn't possible and she sets out to find who did the crime. Lena questions Desiree's friends, retracing Desiree's actions in the last weeks before she died. Finally, Lena discovers the truth, but in doing so, puts herself in danger. No one is above suspicion.
I was really excited to read this book because I read some reviews that were great, but I found it to be just OK.

Like A Sister is a page-turning mystery that I found hard to put down. It is an easy read and kept my attention - so much so that I finished it in two days! Lena and her sister, Desiree, could not be any more different. Desiree was a lot to handle and Lena had not spoken to her in a few years. When Desiree dies from an accidental overdose, Lena knows that cannot be right and she begins her search for the truth. Great story, good character development, highly recommend!

Lena is a smart graduate student at Columbia, who is estranged from her rich hip hop mogul father and her hard partying influencer half sister, Desiree. But when Desiree is found dead on a playground, Lena suspects that this was not a simple overdose and begins to investigate her sister's life and death. While the middle section dragged a bit, Lena was a great character and I enjoyed the secondary characters as well. I look forward to more books by this author!½

This newish mystery centers on a murdered Black social media influencer whose half-sister is the only person who believes she didn’t die by overdose. Read my full review here.½

This was a freebie I received at Bouchercon 2018 (the author was there, but I never met her and have no obligation to her or Midnight Ink). When I saw this on the freebie table, I immediately grabbed it because it was obviously a cozy mystery, the first in a new series, and I've been looking for new series. It was also an obvious fit for for the bingo Diverse Authors square and the back of the book made it sound like a great read right up my alley. It was ticking all the boxes.

Ok, so maybe not quite all the boxes, as it turns out. There was a lot to like in this book and I think Garrett has found a unique niche for Day's investigations - the refreshingly mercenary angle of "doing it for the money", i.e. investigating the crimes the police are offering reward money for. But there were also a few things that dragged the story down and left me feeling less than enthusiastic.

What I didn't like:
The story was too long and the pace dragged. Every scene was just too detailed and long. A tighter editing process would, I think, have helped a lot without losing any of the story and it would have given the book a snappier pace.

One of the characters, the brains/girl with all the cool gadgets, spoke in text speak. All the time. Do people actually speak in text speak? Because if those people actually exist, they should be smacked about until real words come out of their mouths. It was annoying as hell reading it; I can't imagine remaining calm if someone started speaking it to me.

Slightly less annoying, although only because it's such a frequent device I've become numb to it over time, is the MC never seeing a conclusion she wasn't ready to jump to. At least the author set her up to do it with a believable amount of desperation as a motivation.

What I did like were all the strong female characters; even the shallow ones were likeable and the friendships came across as believable and relatable. I liked Day, the MC, too. Her life is a mess, but she knows it; she has her head on straight, and even though she has a few too many TSTL moments, I found myself cheering her on. I liked the plot too, though it would have been so much better for having had a tighter editing and fewer conclusion jumps. As a reader, I should never lose count of how many people the protagonist has accused of a crime.

Overall, I think the author has a lot of talent for writing mysteries with a solid cast of characters. A stronger editing would have made this a much better book though, and ffs, lose the text speak.

I read this for the Diverse Voices Square for Halloween Bingo.½

A young woman who is estranged from her sister and father - a popular internet influencer and a highly-successful entertainment mogul respectively = needs answers when her sister is found dead in the Bronx, assumed to be an accidental overdose. That would never happen. She hated needles. And she would never be caught north of Manhattan. Unless she was trying to connect with the sister she hadn't spoken to ever since a fateful car accident.

I struggled a bit at first with this book. Though our protagonist is level-headed, rides a bike to get around town, and lives with an aunty in an unfashionable area while going to graduate school, there's a barrage of brand-dropping to the point that it seemed to be more about wealthy excess as a way of life than about solving the mystery. (I also felt the narrator's constant use of metaphors were sometimes a stretch, though there's certainly a precedent in American crime fiction to use clever similes going back to the hardboiled tradition.) But the more I read, the more absorbed I was. The damage done by excessive consumerism and display of wealth through social media is a major theme, and it's refreshing to read a Black author writing about Black people without focusing on poverty, but at the same time being honest about how racism shapes the lives of even the most successful people living in a racist society. It's honest without making it the focal point. And that's one of the strengths of the novel, it's not about white folks. I ended up really enjoying it, and it has some great twists and turns.

So the writer has a really good voice for the narrator. She's funny and smart (about some things) and I appreciated the diversity of the cast. But I think I might just be over the amateur sleuth genre. The narrator was also dumb and reckless and pretty clueless in her relationships. If you enjoy Stephanie Plum (which I did for a few books but eventually the lack of any improvement in her chosen field wore too thin), you'll likely enjoy this book as well. I just wanted to like it more.

Hollywood Homicide by Kellye Garrett is a 2017 Midnight Ink publication.

Amusing and highly entertaining!

Dayna, an out of work actress, is in desperate need of money- not just so she can eat, but because her parents need her help. When she witnesses a hit and run, and discovers there is a sizeable reward for information leading to an arrest- Dayna turns amateur detective in hopes of claiming the reward money.

She soon discovers the case could be connected to a recent spate of crimes in Hollywood- which sends her on a madcap mission to find a murderer. It’s a grand adventure until Dayna becomes a target...

I found this book on Scribd and liked the sound of it. The ratings were solid, so I decided to give it a try- and hit pay dirt. A light, very funny, mystery with great characters, some surprise twists, against a Hollywood backdrop. Dayna is hysterical, the pacing is brisk, and the story is entertaining all the way around.

Yes, it checks all the ‘cozy’ mystery boxes, but anyone who likes humorous mysteries will enjoy this one.

Looking forward to the follow up!

4 stars

I was so excited to see another book in this fun series, Dayna is an out of work spokesperson for a fast-food chain, but she's liberated herself from all the dieting and the other junk that goes along with being an actress.
Her true niche in LA is being an investigator, she got lucky last year with solving a few crimes. She has the LA tip line programmed on her I-Phone that's how she's making a living these days.
It's award season in Hollywood and her boyfriend and his series are up for the biggest award for television, The Silver Sphere Award. Her boyfriend's publicist is doing everything in her power to keep Dayna out of the works, they have a mutual dislike for one another but she's more than happy for her boyfriend.
There is a murder after the awards that opens up pandora's box regarding some major players in the Hollywood.
Dayna is found in some laugh out loud situations trying to find out who the really murdered this somewhat meek and mild publicist, unlike the tiger who ruthlessly represents her boyfriend. This case has Dayna going in so many directions and along with her good friends and Uber, she's not going to give up until she gets to the bottom of this box that's been popped open.
The witty dialog between Dayna and her friends plus her zany inconveniences such as her problem with passwords and other things that makes us all CRAZY makes me think that Dayna Anderson and Kellye Garrett are one and the same. She's a hoot and well worth getting to know.
I would like to thank Midnight Ink and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this galley in exchange for my honest review.

This is my selection for the 2018 Read Harder challenge task #21: read a mystery by a person of color or LGBTQ+ author.

This was a fun read. I look forward to the next in the series :)

As the opening salvo of a new series, this is a sparkler. Cute, snappy, fun, and a little sassy / tongue-in-cheek are definitely great ways to describe this one.

I really liked Day (short for Dayna), a recognizable face from a once-popular commercial who now struggles for work (and money) once the ad campaign moved on.

Day decides to dabble in detective work because she's in a tight financial spot and sees a billboard with an offer of reward money for a tip that leads to an arrest. At first she plays private eye for the money, and then she discovers she enjoys and is pretty good at the gig. Joined by her two BFF girlfriends, plus a now-famous, long-time guy friend from high school, and a rogue cop, she cuts a swath through Hollywood trying to figure out a hit-and-run and in the process, nabbing a theft ring (aka the Rack Pack) that steals clothes, shoes, and jewelry, from young, rich celebrities.

There are a lot of pop culture / Hollywood-ish Easter Eggs and name drops to be a playful send-up of this glittery world, including a Hollywood blogger's weekly blind item that everyone frantically tries to guess, the do-anything-for-PR crowd, red-carpet premiere walking, luxe brands, locations, and more.

This isn't high-brow fiction and doesn't pretend to be. It's a fun just-insidery-enough read with great characters and it sparkles with flair like a faux-gemstone statement ring and animal print stilettos. Stands alone, even though intended as first in a series.

Recommended--who doesn't need some Day in their life?!