I finished this book by skimming through to the end.
It was starting to bug me.
It's a Christian mystery series and is book one in the series which is titled "The Million Dollar Mysteries".
I started out really liking the book but there were things in it that just didn't seem "right" for a genre with the label "Christian fiction".
STORY SUMMARY
Callie is a former lawyer and private investigator. She currently is an employee of the J.O.S.H.U.A. Foundation which gives money...large amounts of money....to non-profit organization and upstanding charities. She investigates each organization and presents them with the grant money which is given by her boss, the mysterious Tom......whom she has never met. He is anonymous yet heads up this foundation.
She is coming home on a plane when she gets a call to go to Pennyslvania and present a large sum of money to the Feed the Need organization whose chairman is Wendall Smythe. She is supposed to give him $250,000. She meets him briefly and then has to handle some other things before presenting him with the check. When she returns to his office, she finds him dead on the floor!! It appears to be a homicide!!
At the request of her boss, who was very good friends with Wendall, she begins to probe into his murder. She questions his family members and discovers that she might be the next victim! Meanwhile, she is still trying to grieve and deal with the loss of her own husband, who died in a horrible boating accident 3 years before.
As she tries to solve this "who-dun-it" and stay alive, her faith in God is strengthened.
Will she discover the killer??
MY THOUGHTS
The beginning of the story was fast-paced and well developed. But as I continued later in the book, something kept bugging me. Callie was a lier!! The author had the character lie to certain other characters and this just didn't sit right with me. Callie is supposed to be a woman of God...a Christ follower. And the Word says DO NOT LIE! In fact, i was kind of laughing because our pastor has been doing a sermon series for the last 8 weeks on the 10 commandments. And last week's was about lying. He said we should NEVER lie except to save a person's life. And he gave Biblical examples of when this happened. Because the author is representing Christ as a Christian author of a Christian story, I found this to be sad and it definitely made my rating slip even further in my mind. I mean, if we are going to write and call ourselves Christian, let's do so with integrity. The character was NOT lying to save someone's life but she was lying to get her self out of an ackward situation. I was very disappointed.
The plot line was ok.......it seemed to get bogged down in the middle and I finally told my self to just skim through to the end. Yes, the ending was a bit of a surprise but it was even all that dramatic.
It just showed me once again, that the Christian fiction novels are just not as good, in my opinion, as some of the secular books I've enjoyed over the years. I won't be continuing to get books in this series.
In my opinion, this book is appropriate for ages 14 and older.
On a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest, I rate this a 7.
2 comments:
I have not seen this series...then again, I have been really busy reading only textbooks, lol. I will have to check this book out. Thanks for the heads up.
Thanks for the review, Faithe. I've also skimmed to the end sometimes when the book no longer held my attention. I have to agree with you that a character that is portrayed as a Christian needs to remain faithful to what is right. Young people can read this and think, "Well, I'm a Christian but it must be okay to tell a 'little white lie' if I need to. Unless you count Amish mystery fiction, I've not read any Christian mysteries. Have a great day.
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