by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

The Python stopped by the table. “Let’s do a roundup here. Your top client is charged with murder, his mother is crawling on the floor doing cleanup, his sister has been working her ass off in your kitchen when she should have been a guest, and topping it all off, Tyler Capello—a player you have not signed—shows up at your party with his slimy ex-agent who sets your place on fire. Is that about right?” He punched out the words. “Am I missing anything?” The River was never at a loss for words. Until now.

Susan Elizabeth Phillips is an automatic buy for me both for loyalty’s sake and because even her lesser books are always enjoyable on the whole. There are always hours of entertainment to be had. Nevertheless, I opened this book with a bit of trepidation. She has not been as consistent lately. Also I’m a lot pickier about chick lit than I used to be. I’m much less about the romance and the usual tropes these days. But SEP always delivers effortless humor, and is such an engaging writer, that she drew me right in like the premier Rom-Com writer she is. I was happily reading along thinking how similar this was to one of her best books, Match Me if You Can, when I realized that I really didn’t like the main character, Rory. Not a good thing. She was a brat. And to make it worse, SEP seemed to think that just because Rory is  self-aware and acknowledges her brattiness to herself, it somehow excuses her behavior and makes her more likable. Not to me. She does this throughout the book, until she finally actually ratchets down her nonsense and starts to get it together.

Rory has always felt “less than” thanks to her father and stepmother who always put her down and compared her to their perfect son, her half-brother, Clint. He is now a star football player playing for the Chicago Stars and a client of Brett, a sports agent who works for Heath Champion “The Python”, the hero of the aforementioned Match Me if You Can. Clint is infatuated with a beautiful shallow gold digger and is on the outs with both Rory and Brett because they tried to tell him the truth about her. Early in the book (slight spoiler), Ashley is murdered and Clint disappears. This is ample excuse to throw the two leads together to solve the murder, find Clint, and needless to say, fall in lust, then love, as is usual in this genre. While driving together to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, I was irritated by Rory and Brett’s totally gratuitous encounter with some survivalist conspiracy theory MAGA types. Although played for laughs, it wasn’t that funny and served no purpose but to give the author the excuse to vent her rage against these people and to espouse her views on true patriotism. Even though I largely agree with her, I just wanted to tell her to settle down. One sided portrayals do more harm than good. I waited in vain for some balance. She included a similar group in an earlier book, but they were well-rounded and had some relevance to the plot.

I didn’t enjoy the banter that SEP is so good at as much as I usually do because most of it was based on Rory’s unnecessarily rude comments and it made me dislike her even more. About halfway through, Clint is found and, Whoops! Strike three. I despised him even more than Rory. I hope SEP does not use Clint as the hero of her next Chicago Stars book because, like his sister Rory, he was a brat. In his case, he was a petulant spoiled whiny brat. It was disappointing because he was described by all and sundry in the highest possible terms as honest, moral, talented and smart. Wish we had seen that side of him much sooner than we did. As it was, it was too little too late.

Thank Goodness it is about at this time that Rory has an epiphany and starts to behave in a more mature manner.

Sitting here surrounded by gravestones, she saw the truth. She didn’t have the guts to put herself on the line. Big dreams without follow-through was her mode, and the reason was blindingly clear. As long as she didn’t really try, she didn’t have to risk failing.

Throughout most of the book, she refuses to accept any financial help from all of the rich people in her life to pull herself out of her debt and start realizing her dream of making chocolate for a living. She finally realizes that instead of accepting charity, she can accept money as an investment in her business. That bright idea took a lot longer than it should have considering the desperate straits in which she had found herself. We know what a genius she is at her craft thanks to all of the chocolate porn. Unfortunately, about the time Rory and Clint start to get less irritating, our hero, Brett, who I hadn’t had any problems with, turns into a stalker. When Rory confronts him about his feelings towards her, he blows it and won’t admit that he loves her. (Possibly because he doesn’t know he’s in love with her, which is another Chick-Lit trope I am so tired of). Rory rightly tells him to get lost. And he. Will. Not. Leave. Her. Alone.

In the middle of all this Rory’s stepmother appears on the scene and, as I suspected, she is not the evil witch that Rory had made her out to be. I liked her romance with an on-the-spectrum nerdy guy although it was still very trope-y. What about Ashley’s real killer? You may well ask. I won’t say who it was but it was extremely lame. Probably #1 on the list of Things Not to Do in a murder mystery.

All in all, despite SEP’s writing talent and humor, I felt like her heart wasn’t really in this one. It had too much in common with Match Me if You Can (quirky feisty girl meets Master of the Universe) With some plot things thrown in and some subtracted to make it just different enough. But Susan Elizabeth Phillips is still on my automatic buy list. Because the good thing about inconsistency is that if an author’s latest book is a disappointment, that means that maybe her next one will be great. But please, Elizabeth, can we just have a heroine with a normal profession next time? How about a teacher or an accountant instead of a matchmaker, opera singer, puppeteer, portrait painter, Genius Physics Professor, Televangelist’s widow, former child star (twice), First Lady of the United States, etc. etc.?