Swearing on the Grave of Elvis –Book Review

You know how some movie reviews say ‘wait for it on video’?  Well, for this book, I say wait for it to enter the public domain.  I know that’s a really long time, but trust me, if you die first, you won’t have missed anything.

Curing the Blues with a New Pair of Shoes has nothing to do with any one having the blues and there isn’t a single pair of new shoes in the entire book.  That’s the least of the misleads.

The book’s summary describes it as a mystery novel about Elvis’ blue suede shoes going missing just before the start of a huge celebration for Elvis’ birthday in Salt Lick, Texas.  It talks about how these two friends who run a beauty shop and a detective agency are going to have to figure out what happened to the shoes.  - Apparently this book is part of a series about these two women. – It adds that maybe they’ll have some time for some match making on the side.

Ok, the book begins with the shoes going missing, that plot’s there for a second, and then the whole book is pretty much about that match making part.  There is almost no sleuthing for the shoes, with the whole missing shoe thing being barely a background story while the two out-of-town reporters being match-made take over the story.  It doesn’t matter though, the reader will figure out what happened to the shoes before the plot even goes off track.

Just before the end of the book, it’s as if the author suddenly remembered the original plot and has the detectives find the shoes, exactly where the reader expected them to found back at the very beginning.  There, the chapters end, without resolving that whole match-made love affair that was the main focus of most of the book.  So there’s a rushed little epilogue added onto the end, basically saying “and they all lived happily ever after.”

So the book was distracted, predictable, a little boring.  None of that was that bad, and listening to the story (this was my audio book for bus rides) was better than listening to people on their cell phones.  Mostly.  There was one thing that absolutely drove me crazy about the book.  The two main characters, the detective, beauty-shop, middle-aged women had the foulest mouths I’ve ever encountered.  And I listen to rap music!  If I had switched all their swear words to vampires, this could have been a Twilight novel.

I don’t know why the author felt the need to write the f-word and other four letter friends so often.  Maybe it was supposed to some how be more realistic (do adults in Texas really swear that much?!), but all it was in reality was  very, very distracting.

Note: I finished two books today, one physical book and this audio book.  Tomorrow’s book review will be much happier.