Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Case of the Sin City Sister

Title: The Case of the Sin City Sister
Author: Lynne Hinton
Published: May 19, 2015 by Thomas Nelson
Format: Paperback, 320 pages
Genre: Mystery
Source: My thanks to Netgalley and Thomas Nelson Fiction for an opportunity to read an advance copy of this book.
Series: A Divine Private Detective Agency Mystery #2

I am still not one hundred percent sold on this series, the bones are there, but the delivery is all wrong.

This story begins with Caleb Alford entering the Divine (pronounced Devine) Private Detective Agency in search of a long lost relative but soon that plot is taken over by Sister Evangeline’s sister Dorisanne who has suddenly gone missing but that story is spiked with a third plot involving Epi Salazar and his needing the Captain, Eve’s father and owner of the Agency, to come out to his property to help him look for gold.

Let me back up, if you have not read the previous book, Sister Evangeline has been a member of the Our Lady of Guadalupe Abbey in Madrid, New Mexico. Ever since her last visit with her father, where she helped him solve a murder, she has been having second thoughts about remaining at the convent. She is drawn between the two worlds and has been praying for divine intervention. The agency has fed her spirit, engaged her mind and fulfilled her in a way that has been missing. Maybe a leave of absence will help.

Returning home, she is once again helping her father with agency business when her wild child sister Dorisanne disappears and Eve, with the help of her father’s ex-police partner Daniel head out to Las Vegas to find her.

The story is convoluted and at times jumps to conclusions with no real substantiation. For a nun that claims that she has been sheltered, she seems to know more than she should. One minute she is naïve, and the next appears to have cat like instincts on how to recognize people, find clues or get out of tricky situations.

There were a couple of things that really bothered me. One, Lynne Hinton should know the difference between polygamy and bigamy; and second, I have never known a hospital to have the morgue on the third floor. Though that sounds minor, I was really distracted from the rhythm of the book.

In the end, I think the author tried to put too much in here. The missing great-grandfather that was mentioned in the beginning was somewhat forgotten thought out most of the book, by the end, I had to go back to the beginning and recall who Epi was and the whole love thing with Daniel was ridiculous to the point that it sounded like a last minute add in.

I really want to like this series, but my patience was really being tried.

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