The Tuesday Night Survivors' Club is a small-town bookshop cozy and the first book in a new mystery series by Lynn Cahoon. Due out 14th June 2022 from Kensington on their Lyrical imprint, it's 175 pages and will be available in paperback, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately.
This is a light and fluffy cozy mystery built around a strong romance/women's fiction framework. The titular Survivors' Club is a group of women who gather to discuss books as well as their previous cancer diagnoses and treatments (that's the survivor part). When one of their number is murdered, they decide to investigate. The author is quite adept and prolific; she knows what she's doing. As such, although it's almost entirely dialogue driven, it was readable and moderately engaging. There were several places in the story I found myself rolling my eyes over some less than believable dialogue, but I persevered to the end and found the denouement and resolution satisfying if a bit predictable. There was no real push-back from official law enforcement when Rarity & co. decide to investigate the crime and that rankled a bit.
The unabridged audiobook has a run time of 7 hours and is narrated by C.S.E. Cooney. The book is full of dialogue from characters of varying ages and accents, both male and female. She does manage to keep them mostly distinct from one another. Her rendering of main protagonist Rarity Jones, has some odd breathy, almost adenoidal quality which I never warmed to, unfortunately. Her voice for Rarity's best friend Sam is some eldritch mix of deep Louisiana bayou with an uptonal Georgia twang (everything she says sounds like a question) and although the character herself is sympathetic, her accent made me want to hop back over to the ebook format. I split the book about 50/50 between audio and print, and I honestly think I'd've enjoyed it more if I had stuck to print format only.
I absolutely love bookstore cozies, and there are some good name-drops included here. It was fun to figure out which books she's discussing even when she doesn't name them outright. I'll be sticking around for a while to see how the series develops.
Three and a half stars for the book overall, two and a half for the audiobook narration.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
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