Description
She juggles life with a sense of humour and the enduring knowledge that everything is temporary.
A Veronica Tracey Mystery
“I’m looking for a private investigator. I have lost something.”
Not someone?
“My speciality is people and I’ve been known to find the occasional lost dog.”
“How about garden ornaments?”
“Pardon?” I could feel a frown puckering the skin on my forehead and worked hard to dislodge it.
“I’ve lost some garden ornaments.”
“That’s not something I’ve ever been asked to find before. What type of ornaments?”
“Gnomes,” he said with a straight face.
“Gnomes? Are you serious?”
Margaret Craigie –
Review: Nothing Happens Here by DJ Lane
Nothing Happens Here is a tale set in the relatively quiet town of Upper Hutt where a personal investigator is required to find three garden gnomes filled with deadly viruses and an antidote. It is the job of Veronica (Ronnie), the personal investigator, to replace the gnomes with fake replicas and give the originals to her customer, an American actor. Dead bodies pop up periodically, and Ronnie must avoid becoming one herself.
The Good:
I loved the fact that the story was based in my own home town. Obviously, most books are not centred in Upper Hutt, and I usually skim-read whether a vet practice is next to a pharmacy, or how roads are laid out. Not this time! It made me linger over Lane’s descriptions of streets and gardens, triggering memories here, wanting to check details there. It was a pleasure buried deep in my subconscious seeing the light of day only when the author took me down familiar paths.
The Not So Good:
Although Lane’s attention to detail was astounding, it became almost OCD in nature, to the point of irritation. A large amount of space was given to how Ronnie attached her dog to its harness. Three ladies were waiting in a car, and instead of simply turning the air-conditioning on, it was done to eighteen degrees AND so that it was neither too warm, too chilly, or too drafty. A night-time excursion resulted in Ronnie realising her torch was missing, and she used another instead. None of these minutiae had any importance or relevance to the main plot or even the subplots.
The Beautiful:
I very much enjoyed Ronnie’s Nana, who I suspect is like grandmothers everywhere. She tries to marry her grandchildren (homosexual or not) to respectable partners of the opposite gender. I’m sure many an adult has had to endure interference from their elders on the subject of love, a universally understood problem for grandchildren worldwide. Nana may not have the caustic wit of the Dowager Duchess from Downton Abbey, but she is still a fantastic character, meddling and interfering where she can. I particularly liked Lane’s incredibly realistic description of a (very) mature person struggling to cope with modern technology.
Lane has a lovely, very dry sense of humour peppered throughout the book. All in all, very entertaining, and I’m glad I read it.
Claire Macfarlane –
Good fun