Miss Pettybone's First Case

Miss Pettybone's Southern Series

by Melissa J. Rees

If life is what you make it, then Miss Loraine Pettybone figured she took a wrong turn, a long time ago. Her job as a postal worker, for the last seventeen years is duller than her love life, and as middle age threatens to spreads its cloak around her, she realizes how boring and mundane her life has become.
When a tall, dark, mysterious, stranger rents out an isolated farmhouse on her route, she is intrigued. After she stumbles over his dead body while delivering his mail, she is hooked.
Jumping into the investigation with both size-nine sensible shoes, she is determined to investigate the murder and track down the killer.
While she races after clues like her hair was on fire, she never slows down long enough to figure out what to do if she catches the murderer. A mistake with dangerous consequences!

Genres: Mystery, Cozy Mystery

334 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 23, 2011

Reviews

[Jean · Rating 2 out of 5]

Actually the story wasn't too bad. It is a cozy mystery set in small town Missippi and Miss Pettybone, bored with her life and her job decides that she can solve the murder. She even feels entitled to solve it since she has found the body, while on her postal route. The story takes the usual twists and turns of this genre, involving other interesting characters and leading Miss Pettybone to new places.
The problem with this book is it is desparate for an editor, possibly even just a second reader. The grammer is poor, the mistakes in story progression are blatant and she does a poor job of trying use southern speech, ie: you all instead of ya'll.
If you love cozy mysteries, you can do better than this one, but if you can read around the glaring errors, as I said, the story isn't bad.

[Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all) · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't usually rate DNFs, but I feel I should warn you...the dreadful lack of editing made it impossible to read. From elementary-school errors of subject/verb agreement to substitution of homophones or just similar-sounding words (and all between), it was simply excruciatingly bad. We won't even discuss the overdescription of every scene and action. Why, for example, does the reader need to know that a character fished a "small light-yellow plastic lighter" out from between the cushions to light his cigarrette, unless the fact that it is yellow and made of plastic has some importance to the story (which it doesn't)?

Granted, I teach ESL, which makes me more sensitive to poor mechanics than most, but this was simply impossible to trudge through. I wish I could teleport the authoress and her manuscript back to my 8th grade composition class. I would love to hear what Miss Reidler had to say to her.

[Nola Arganbright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very funny

Miss Pettybone and her sleuthing friends make this a fun book to read. Fast paced and filled with quirky Southern characters this is the quintessential look into Southern small town life.

[Judy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am reading the Kindle edition of this book and it is riddled with spelling and word usage errors that detract from my enjoyment of it. I wonder who proofreads (if anybody does) the Kindle editions. I feel as if I were reading Freshman compositions -- the errors are so basic. I could overlook an occasional typo, but when "shining" is repeatedly rendered as "shinning," the problem is not typographical. I have very little patience for those errors in published work.

Although as cozy mysteries go, this one is a pretty good read, I do wonder why the author belabors the point of her characters' ages, telling us repeatedly that Miss Pettybone is 36 years old. Miss Pettybone and her friends talk and act more like people in their 50s, which is still young to this reader.

First novel -- maybe this author will mature and her future books will be less self-conscious, but she (or the electronic company) really do need to hire a proofreader. (I'm available -- just saying).

[Janet Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. The characters were well developed and the story moved at a nice pace. I liked the short chapters. (It makes it easier to say just one more chapter before I have to stop reading.)
Highly recommended.

[bex · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unfortunately it has copious bad guy POV, which eliminates all mystery, and a hook ending. Positives... I sorta liked the bored-with-life MC. Shame it was ruined. 2*

[Kitty Tomlinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Miss Lorraine Pettybone, a mail lady in rural Beatty MS, finds a dead body and drags her friends into helping her find the murderer. Fun read.

[Mare · Rating 3 out of 5]

I just counted warm up to the characters. Good setting and nice writing, it just didn't click for me.

[Gail · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book. Miss Pettybone is a letter carrier in Mississippi who loves Miss Marple and Nancy Drew. Although she never mentioned it, there's a little Harriet the Spy mixed in. She's never married and lived in the same town all her life. She's not twenty something and a little self-conscious about her age and a little set in her ways.

One of the men on her route is a stranger, rude and uncommunicative. She needs to deliver a registered letter and after several days of no response, she breaks into his house and discovers he is dead.

Her routine and boring life has become more exciting and along with an eccentric cast of characters she goes sleuthing and encounters danger, potential romance, and adventure.

This is a pretty good story. I gave it four stars because of the characters. The mystery is pretty standard and well thought out, though you know who did it. It's more of a matter of the procedural and the characters.

There was one vignette that was a gem, and that was a glimpse into the emotional life of the sherrif, that was dropped. It showed some really nice writing talent. However that part of the narrative was not followed. It's probably a set up for subsequent books. In a few short paragraphs, this character was rounded out with a deft hand, more so than the other characters.

I'm not the grammar and typo police and only complain when it distracts from the story. And this did. Not only grammar, but continutity with characters misnamed (easy to do) and details switched out. (Like seeing palm trees in a movie supposedly taking place in Maine). An author should not edit herself and this needed a copy editor and then an editor for continuity.

I hope the author continues to grow her stories and her talent and find herself a writing buddy who is a good editor.

[Amanda]

Miss Pettybone's First Case

Lorraine Pettybone, mail carrier, stumbles into a dead body and decides the Sheriff needs some assistance in solving the murder. In her later years, but not old, Miss Pettybone starts her investigation. While searching the house where the murder took place, Miss Pettybone is struck over the head. More determined than ever to find the culprit, Miss Pettybone exists the help of her best friend. Traveling to New York then to Savannah in search of the murderer, Miss Pettybone has a grand time until someone tries to run her down and 2 of her friends are kidnapped. Miss Pettybone is a refreshing change to the usual cozy mystery heroine- laugh out loud funny at times due to their antics, I thoroughly enjoyed being introduced to Miss Pettybone and her friends. I am looking forward to reading more in this series. Highly recommended to all cozy mystery readers looking for a change of pace.

[Leanne · Rating 1 out of 5]

The story is fine, maybe even better than fine. I was so frustrated by the typographical errors that it was difficult to concentrate fully on the story. It appears that the author/editor relied solely on an automatic spell check for proofreading (course instead of coarse; hear instead of here; a character's name spelled Scot and Scott multiple times on the same page; etc).

The main character is 36, but behaves as though she is 60. And one wonders if Pepsi Co. was giving out product placement bonuses given the excessive number of times it's mentioned specifically in this book.

Still, the story reads fairly well and some of the characters on the periphery have potential. I'll give this series one more chance.

[Bette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Miss Pettybone finds a body and all at once her life is not so boring. She just knows that she has the deductive logic that will have her solving this murder. Women sleuths, cozy mystery, middle-age, Mississippi, Georgia, New York; looking for the murders of a man on Miss Pettybone’s mail route.

Holds many of the elements that make a book a fun read for me. A solid plot. Characters that are not over the top eccentric, but are interesting. Humor.

[Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good cozy to read, Miss Pettybone is so very opinated --- the characters in the story were comical, interesting and unusual --- read it enough that I went and found another one of the Series to read!

[M-J · Rating 3 out of 5]

I continued to read the book, hoping to eventually begin to connect with the characters but they were just not believeable. I will not be waiting for Miss Pettibone's next adventure.

[Dayle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entertaining!