Considering the nice time I had with A Deadly Inside Scoop, I tried to repeat my success. So I combined another cozy mystery with some base-building in Factorio. While I was able to upgrade my base to have logistics robots, I was a little let down by Beaches, Bungalows & Burglaries, book 1 of the Campers and Criminals series.
The premise is: Mae West’s life is upended by the arrest of her husband, and she relocates to a camper/trailer at the Happy Trails Park (which she now owns) in the town of Normal, Kentucky. Her husband Paul has been busted for running a Ponzi scheme that bilked dozens of people out of their life savings, including several residents of Mae’s new town. She has to balance adapting to the camper lifestyle, renovating the park, and winning over the residents of her new property. When her husband turns up at the park dead, she also has to navigate being a murder suspect and finding the real killer.
The individual components of a successful cozy mystery are all here. Mae is a plucky and upbeat protagonist who overcomes some of her bourgeois tendencies and falls in love with her new life. The book has quirky side characters, a triangle romance sideplot, and a “We can do it!” attitude when it comes to renovating the park.
But something just didn’t sit right. Mae’s “fall” at the start of the story still leaves her as a fairly powerful landlord in charge of dozens of Normal residents. Her tenants rallying to help their landlord fix up the place just doesn’t hit for me. Sure, she doesn’t sell the park for profit in the end, but she was sure considering it for much of the book! Mae’s ignorance of her husband’s shady doings also doesn’t sit right with me–how oblivious can you be? Granted, the other characters do comment on this, so…I don’t know. No individual element was an interest-killer, and it’s a short enough book that it doesn’t overstay its welcome, but I was eager to be done with it by the end.
Considering this series has (at time of writing) 39 installments, I suspect the problem may be with me rather than with the book. If you’ve been following my reviews from the IG days, you probably noticed my reading habits are a little all over the place. I can lose interest in certain subjects fairly quickly, so I try to keep things fresh. Doing two cozies back-to-back might have been a mistake. Or maybe it’s because there was no cat. I’m not ashamed of that bias.
Regardless, give this a read if you’re looking to kill five hours on a long car ride. I don’t regret reading it, but I’ve read better. Maybe book 2 will land a bit more smoothly.
HodrosBooks 
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