Deadly Charm by Claudia Mair Burney
ISBN: 9781416551959
The back of this book bills it as a zany, thrilling mystery wherein our heroine, the quirky Dr. Amanda Bell Brown must find the cause for the death of a disgraced playboy evangelist’s baby. I received a copy by request through the LibraryThing Early Readers Program (where it was not disclosed that it was Christian fiction) and I requested it because fiction with minority leads is something I’m actively trying to include more of here at BookLove.
Unfortunately, I simply could not get into this book.
The story opens with a long, lamenting conversation between Bell and her BFF/kinda of love interest (except she’s married) which covers a lot of what happened in the first two books in the series and what happened between books. As a first time reader I was left with absolutely no clue what was going on, other than Bell, in an effort to make up with Rocky (the BFF who apparently put her marriage in danger before abandoning her, and who repeatedly teases her and calls her “babe” constantly) agrees to go visit a disgraced evangelist trying to make a comeback.
The second chapter opens with Bell and Rocky arriving at the location where the evangelist is filming his sermon. Bell is promptly assaulted by an old religious woman who calls Bell a hussy for being there with her pastor, and forcibly exorcises her, claiming a demon of interracial adultery is dwelling inside of her. Rocky, the charming BFF that he is, sits in his VIP seat and is amused by the antics, doing nothing at all to help.
After the sermon Rocky gets Bell backstage to meet the evangelist, Ezekiel Thunder. It’s there that Bell meets Little Zeke Thunder, Big Thunder’s 2 year old son. Bell is smitten, but launches into heartache over her own inability to have children, save for the fact that she’s been nauseated a lot lately. But she can’t have kids, she reassures herself, because she had a period since her husband left her and she has endometriosis, not to mention she has a tumor. With the subtly of a brick to the face, this “I can’t be pregnant despite obvious weight gain, morning sickness and soreness” becomes a repetitive source of angst. When Bell finally moves past the topic secondary characters constantly bring it up, accusing her of being pregnant, kicking off the whole response again.
In chapters three and four Bell insists she isn’t pregnant, then is threatened by the same person who assaulted her in the previous chapter, blatantly and maliciously manipulated by Thunder, again while her BFF Rocky just stands to the side, or defends Thunder.
It is never really explained why Rocky wants her to meet this clearly malicious, manipulative preacher. There’s eventually something about Rocky wanting her to find God again, but that should never excuse the sort of behavior Bell has been subjected to.
In chapter five Bell finally does something that made me like her, she self soothes with a peppy new haircut. But when she returns to work she discovers her parking lot filled with the vehicles of all her closest, except her husband. Despite being forewarned Bell walks into the intervention. What is traditionally a last ditch effort to get a person with substance abuse to realize the extent of their actions is bastardized in this chapter as Bell’s nearest and dearest claim the intervention is because she’s fat, because her husband (who left her) is heart broken without her and she should go back to him, and because she is clearly pregnant and too old to be so (Bell is 35). The conversation is excessively scattered and even deviates into one of Bell’s friends claiming it’s not always all about Bell, except one would assume that an intervention IS about the person being confronted.
I stopped when I read the following interaction:
“If Jazz (Bell’s husband) is the one who left me, and he’s the one who is drinking excessively, why didn’t you do the intervention with him?”
“Because all of this is your fault,” my mother said.
If I hadn’t been at a doctor’s appointment I would have flung the book across the room. I did try to skip ahead in the book to see if it picked up, only to land on a scene where a doctor tells Bell and her husband, Jazz that Bell has a grapefruit-sized tumor, several grape=sized tumors and is also pregnant with twins.
The artificial drama is staggering in this book and completely distracts from the mystery Deadly Charm is advertised as containing. There is no time or build up to allow for readers to grow attached to Bell and having every character treating her like utter crap doesn’t make her sympathetic. Furthermore the pregnancy side plot is a huge problem. The medical problems (pregnant, with tumors) reads as more unbelievable, and unneeded drama, there’s never a question in the reader’s mind whether Bell is pregnant or not, and the utter insensitivity that everyone else in the book shows for Bell’s reproductive problems is pretty insulting.
It’s a bad combination of writing flaws, so Deadly Charm ends up in the DNF pile.