An old Writer’s Digest featured an article with a police officer about how to write good crime fiction. One of his pet peeves was calling a perpetrator a perp. “We don’t talk like that,” he admonished. “Do your homework.”
A liberal sprinkling of the term “perp” aside, I thoroughly enjoyed Flora’s An Educated Death (and Death in Paradise to a lesser degree). Her heroine is a tough consultant, which, come to think of it, is another thing that bugged me. She is always dropping, “As a consultant …” or “When I say I’m a consultant … “Consultant can mean anything: when I am lecturing Steve on how to do dishes, I am a dishwasher consultant; when he is lecturing me on how to paint walls, he’s a, well, he’s a pain in the ass, but that’s neither here nor there. I digress. So anyway.
Thea is an educational consultant who does … well, educational consulting stuff and she has a knack for getting into trouble. A student at a New England boarding school drowns and Thea goes up to do damage control. But could it be murder? Why yes, it could, and what ensues is a riveting story that kept me up until about 1 the other night to finish.
Death in Paradise was kinda boring in comparison.