Blog Tour: Dinner at Deadman's + Giveaway

Dinner at Deadman's (A Lorado Martin Mystery) by C.J. West, October 18, 2012. 322 pages. Published by 22 West Books. Source: Partners in Crime Book Tours/author.

Lorado Martin has loved junk since his grandparents took him bottle digging in the backwoods of New England when he was a boy. The search for antiques and collectibles led him to a unique hobby: digging through the estates of the newly deceased, arranging the sale of goods for the heirs, and keeping the leftovers for himself. To make a living he builds and maintains housing for recovering addicts and along the way he's employed a number of his clients. The men wrestle with the siren call of drugs and teach Lorado about the difficult struggle to stay clean one day at a time. When these two worlds come together, Lorado learns that not every elderly person dies of natural causes and that some estates are sold to benefit a killer. His latest project hits close to home. A woman he's known since childhood haunts him from a fresh grave. Her grandson, an affable addict who has fallen off the wagon, stands to inherit a considerable sum whether he deserves it or not.

First Sentence:

February 17th.

Dinner at Deadman's was an okay read, while I was a little disappointed in the way the story was presented, I did enjoy the way the author was able to capture the mood and setting of the book.

So, Dinner at Deadman's had both its good and bad points for me as a reader. For now, I want to talk about the good points that I found while reading this book. While I may not have been too comfortable with some of the aspects of the story, I do feel that the author did a great job of creating characters that were true to the circumstances that they found themselves in. I also thought that he did a pretty great job of creating an atmosphere that would draw readers into the harsh reality of towns and people consumed by the darkness that is drugs and all that comes with that way of life. While some of the vices plaguing a couple of the characters is not necessarily something I would read about, I enjoyed the fact that the author dealt with them in a blunt fashion. He didn't glamorize any aspect of what was happening, but kept it pretty real-ish.

While there were something I liked about this book, what I did not like kinda outweighs the good. Going in to this book I did not think that it would deal so much with the underbelly of society. I thought that it was going to be mainly about the potentially suspicious death of an elderly friend of Lorado's and the solving of said murder. I think had the book focused more on that side of the story that I would have found it to be more favorable for my reading taste. All in all, not a bad read just not exactly what I was expecting when I cracked it opened.

I really wanted to like Dinner at Deadman's more than I did, but there were a few things that kept me from truly being able to enjoy this one. What really kept me from getting into this one would have to be that it took entirely too long for the story to get to the main mystery, that of the death of Mrs. Newbury. While the slowness of getting to the actual mystery that is hinted at as the big draw for the book, I was really put off by the language and some of the content within this book because it just did not look/sound like it was going to have all that.

Content (will contain spoilers; highlight to see):
There is quite a bit that I should mention regarding the content of this one. Some gross, and some of the was just a little too over the top and unneeded.

The gross: What happened in the first few pages very nearly made me DNF this one right out of the gate-ended up skipping over it instead. There is no reason to have included in detail the mess that happened to Lorado when someone spiked his coffee with laxatives and something else, or to go into such detail of what when on in the bathroom. *shudders*

I'm not one for books that mention drugs and prostitution, and the way it was used in the book is part of the reason I did not love it. Words fail me when it comes to describing why it sat so badly with me, but it probably has to do with the fact that two of the guys in the book seemed to see and judge the females in the book based on their bodies before anything else.

Final Verdict: Dinner at Deadman's doesn't pull any punches in portraying the dark side of drugs, greed, and how far people will go to get what they want.

Dinner at Deadman's earns 3 out of 5 pineapples.

Giveaway:
1 ebook copy of Dinner at Deadman's
INT.

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