Heavenly Detour

Rating:
Summary: A wonderful, entertaining book!
Review: Anne Dowd makes a decent living working for Royal Roosts, a real estate firm dealing in uptown Manhattan rentals and sub leases. The whole office is invited to spend July 4th at the owner Agnes Spurgeon's country estate in Sand Point, Long Island. When Annie arrives she meets Michael Rheims, a gorgeous Brit, who puts the moves on her. Anne isn't unhappy with this development but before she gets to enjoy it for very long, she winds up floating dead in the swimming pool.

Annie's ghost lingers on Earth watching the crime scene unfold, observing her family grieve for her, and seeing her ex-husband come home to help the police find out who murdered her. She is able to communicate with only one person, a female detective assigned to her case who takes Annie's presence as an additional aid in solving the case. Everyone, including Annie, comes to the conclusion that the person who killed her is someone she knew and probably trusted.

This is not a dark, foreboding or depressing mystery but a comedic who-done-it along the lines of TOPPER. The heroine has a tongue in check attitude about her own death so the reader doesn't feel morbid because an innocent person was killed. Joanne Meyer's debut novel is exceedingly well written with brilliant characterizations.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: A Divine Intervention
Review: Have you ever wished you could be a fly on the wall, and eavesdrop on others? Annie Dowd does that in "Heavenly Detour," but her circumstances are not heavenly. She's downright frustrated to find herself dead, and on a detour from this earthly dimension to the next. Annie's mother would say it's neither milk nor meat, meaning there's no definition for this place Annie's inhabitating. But Ma Edelstein doesn't know her daughter is hovering over her, witnessing her grief, but unable to console her.

Some say that ghosts are the presences of people who die young, unexpectedly, and are not at peace with their demise. That pretty much describes Annie; who says, "No one was more surprised by my drowning than I."

She remembers the party at Agnes Spurgeon's Long Island estate, where realtors from Royal Roosts are celebrating July Fourth. She remembers getting cozy with a charming Englishman, and drinking wine with him, and that he suddenly disappears. Memory blurs and the next thing she knows, she's floating in the pool.

No one who attended the party seems to have a motive to drown Annie. As Detectives Louis Martola and Charlene Williams talk to Annie's friends and colleagues, they learn that not only was she a good swimmer, she had no enemies. Everyone loved (or at least liked or tolerated) her. The shapely Detective Williams discovers that she's Annie's "receiver," picking up useful information as well as irreverent comments from---the ghost of Annie Dowd?

In addition to playing detective, Annie attends her own funeral. And she falls in love all over again with her ex-husband, Frank Dowd, an overseas investigative reporter. He has hurried back to New York to pay his respects to Annie and her family and to do some private sleuthing. Annie and Frank had been on good terms, seeing each other even after their divorce, but in her altered state Annie can't get through to Frank when things get dangerous. Nor can she compete for his attention when he casts his roving eyes on Detective Williams. She gives Frank her blessing; they're seemingly a match made in Heaven.

Throughout the book, you might forget that Annie is dead; after all, she's telling the story, from her unique perspective. But when the whodunit is solved, and Annie gracefully gives up the ghost and goes to her reward, you'll miss her.

Don't despair. Annie Dowd enjoys making her presence known, so we can hope that she'll make another appearance in the capable hands of talented storyteller Joanne Meyer.

Rating:
Summary: Take a Detour from this!
Review: I was very disappointed with this book. I enjoy comedies, but the majority of the laughs the author aimed for came out of condescending insults from the main character toward her family members and co-workers she deemed beneath her. The humor was mostly cynical, ranging from jabs at egotistical rabbis to looking down on boring housewives.

I also take issue with writers who seem to think their readers are stupid. What I mean is, when a writer actually points out to the reader that he/she has made a pun by writing "(pardon the pun)" after a sentence, that just feels wrong! The same thing occured after the writer made a double entendre (which I'm sure she was just so pleased with and just wanted to make sure that us mere non-writers didn't miss it). And when the main character, Annie, actually yells "Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah!" at a mobster (who, by the way can't hear her), I felt like I had regressed to junior high reading!

And could someone explain the relevance of pointing out the nationality of EVERY taxi driver in the story? Was it to point out her "brilliant" observation that every immigrant coming in feels they have a right to drive a cab? I personally found this point questionably offensive. And comparing a nervous character to a "masturbating adolescent" was over-the-top for me. That last reference made it clear how hard the author was trying to be funny.

Personally, I found the story slow and the mystery predictable. The author wastes time by continuing to remind us at every scene that 1. Annie is dead. 2. No one can hear her (yet she still tries to get through to people with incessant ranting) and 3.They are trying to find a connection between the murderer and the mob. These are things that we as readers knew and were not with such short attention spans that we forgot the plot of the book.

I felt this book would have been much better if the author had actually been comedic rather than insulting various characters and had given up writing down to her audience and assuming that people who actually pick up her book to read for pleasure might actually have the brains to read it.

Rating:
Summary: Don't waste your money
Review: Slow, tedious, drivel. Thank goodness I bought the paperback and not the hardcover.

Rating:
Summary: A wonderful, entertaining book!
Review: You suspect that a story told from a dead person's point-of-view might be morbid or depressing, but Joanne Meyer tends to keep it light and entertaining as Annie Dowd recounts the story of her mysterious drowning and teams up with her ex-husband and two detectives to find out who caused her untimely demise.
You'll find yourself laughing out loud as Annie and her team untangle a web of deception and mystery. I finished this book in a weekend and was pleasantly surprised by the ending (this is one whodoneit that you won't figure out in the first few chapters!)...Meyer writes in a style that reminds me of Ayelet Waldman mixed with Janet Evanovich. Mystery lovers who like a mix of comedy and memorable characters will enjoy "Heavenly Detour!" Meyer now joins my list of authors to watch for!