52 Steps to Murder

52 Steps to Murder (Dekker Cozy Mystery #1)
By: Steve DeMaree

I only finished this book because I am doing a reading challenge that required me to read a book that I started but never finished. There are very few books that I don't finish. But this is one of them- for a good reason.

Lots of reviews say this book is a comedy, but I wouldn't necessarily agree. They try too hard to be funny and witty. And then the main character (it's told from first person perspective) talks about how funny he is and how his partner and him laugh at his humor.

If characters use wit or humor, you don't need to tell the reader that they were laughing about how funny it was. The reader will know it's funny and will know they laughed. We don't need to be told what's witty- we don't need to be told when they were joking or being sarcastic or ridiculous. The banter would have been good if it was like 80% less of what the author used. I prefer Harlan Coben's use of wit and humor by far.

The writing was very disjointed. It might be partly due to the fact that I started and stopped reading so many times, but the writer had a lot of unnecessary dialogue and information. Like telling us the main character went home and pulled out some DVDs he got from Christmas and listing them all off and then telling us which DVD he decided to watch and what the Three Stooges did in the show and then the character turns it off and goes to sleep. We don't need to know all those details.

They also had this theme how each day one of the partners always got a 'message from God' that acted as a clue to help them solve their mystery. This was tacky and unnecessary. They would have been fine solving the crime without it. It was a cheesy addition- not sure if they threw it in there so they can call this a 'Christian' book, but it wasn't doing the book any favors for being classified in that genre.

The title is clever but I got tired of them talking allll the time about how they hated climbing up the steps and all the jokes around climbing them and falling down them. It's a lot of steps- we get it, find something else to talk about.

And then there was the ending. It happened so suddenly. One moment nothing makes sense, and then all of a sudden they arrest someone. Without giving too much away, there is a recording used at the end and the conversation that is overheard is completely unnatural. They 'overhear' the murderer/s telling exactly how everything went down. No one describes details of their master plan to each other afterwards- they both know what happened, it sounded very unnatural.

And then the main character's partner keeps saying 'you never cease to amaze me' about how awesome he is at solving crimes.

If you haven't figured it out by this review yet, I did not like this book and will most likely never read this author again. I did not like his writing style at all and found it very annoying, tacky, unnatural, and disjointed.

‘Cozy mystery’ should have been the first red flag to me as those tend to be a little cheesy.

The only good thing I can say about this book is that I didn't know 'whodunit' until the very end.

There are plenty of other books out there that give you that without wading through the nonsense.