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Sweet Ginger Poison (2000)

by Robert Burton Robinson(Favorite Author)

3.05 of 5 Votes: 5

languge

English

genre

Mystery & Thriller

series

Ginger Lightley Mystery

review 1: Sweet Ginger Poison is another chick lit/detective book. A light read with likeable, but not necessarily loveable, characters, Sweet Ginger Poison is a nice time filler, but not something I would reach for again. Too short to develop any real sense of the main players, with quite a thin story line. It was an easy read, and well written, but a bit thin on the things that count.I gave this 3 stars because I finished it without having to force myself, but I would be unlikely to pick up another book by this author.
review 2: My biggest problem with this book was with the authenticity and likeability of the characters. The main character’s name is Ginger, a 61-year-old lady who owns a coffee cake shop. Ginger is, I believe, supposed to be the likeable char... moreacter in the story. However, she annoyed me to no end. She reminded me of one of those people who haven’t had many life experiences of her own and who haven’t been around much diversity, but who have very definite ideas about how everybody should live their lives and are happy to tell them how to do so. It wasn’t even that I necessarily disagreed with many of her opinions, but the way she presented them made me cringe. Then I was annoyed with the characters who were on the receiving end of her advice, because they didn’t react to such poorly-presented advice in a realistic way. As far as the other characters went, it seemed like they were all stupid or evil or both.Another smaller complaint would be the obligatory romance between Ginger and the reverend. There just wasn’t enough real interaction between them for the relationship to have any impact on me as the reader, and the attempt to create angst between them early on in the book seemed forced. This annoys me in many books, not just this one. It seems like most authors believe that every book they write must have some sort of a romance. If writing a romance isn’t their strong suit, or if it isn’t a natural progression of the story, I wish they would just leave it out and focus on the real story. A good romance can greatly enhance a good book, but a book doesn’t need a romance to be good. A poorly-done romance just drags the book down. What about the story itself? Well, it wasn’t all that bad. It was a little contrived, but interesting enough for me to get through the book. I was always at least a little curious about what would happen next, and curious to see if any of my theories about what had happened would be proven true. Most of the information relevant to really understanding what had happened wasn’t revealed until much later in the book, which might be annoying to some, but that wasn’t really a sore point with me. I have quite a backlog of books on my Kindle that I obtained for free back when it was “new and cool” to get free books for my Kindle and I wasn’t yet being very choosy. I believe this was one of those books. So, to offset my negative review, I would just like to add that this probably isn’t a book that I would have chosen to purchase to begin with. Nor, now that I’m being much choosier, is it one that I would have even chosen to download for free. So perhaps I just wasn’t the target audience. I like the occasional mystery, but I typically lean more toward the fantasy and science fiction genres. When it comes to mysteries, I prefer more realism and darkness.Although it appears that this book is the first one in a series, this book stands completely on its own. So don’t be afraid to give it a try if it sounds interesting to you. You will get a complete story that does not leave you feeling obligated to continue the series if you don’t want to. less

Download links for: Sweet Ginger Poison

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