Paws-itively Guilty

The Saucy Lucy Mysteries #2

by Cindy Keen Reynders

Lexie Lightfoot, owner of the Saucy Lucy Cafe, doesn’t have an ounce of law enforcement training in her body, but when a friend goes missing and Lexie finds her buried in a garden, she decides to lend the police department a hand. Once the investigation begins, Lexie and her sister Lucy manage to rattle a few old skeletons and dig up secrets that folks would rather leave hidden. When things start to cook, the sisters and Lurch, their adopted oversize canine investigator, find themselves in a heap of hot water.

325 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published December 1, 2008

About the author

She's lived in Japan and visited Canada, the Philippines, Samoa, Hawaii, the Caribbean and New Zealand.

Her mystery series includes The Saucy Lucy Murders, Paws-itively Guilty and A Killer Slice.

The Wysteria Hedge Haven Clan series is about witch sisters with a flair for impractical magic. The Seven-Year Witch, A Witch at Midnight and Witch Tease.

Wild Creek Whispers, the first book in the Reese Golden Mystery series, will be released by Camel Publishing April 12, 2022.

Visit her website at www.cindykeenreynders.com where you can contact her via e-mail. From her website, you can also link to her blog or visit her on Facebook.

Reviews

[Lauren Stoolfire · Rating 1 out of 5]

Paws-itively Guilty (The Saucy Lucy Mysteries #2) by Cindy Keen Reynders has one of the worst covers I've ever seen in person. I spotted it at a friends of the library book sale where you could fill up an entire bag for only $5, so I thought I'd give this cozy mystery a chance. As it turns out, it's only slightly better than the cover let on. Slightly, but that's not saying much. I know this is a sequel and I've never read the first book, but I'm not interested in tracking down its predecessor.

[Patty · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the second in a series which can often be less well done than the first. To me it was a good mystery with some interesting characters and some growth in the behavior of the sisters Lexie and Lucy. Lexie was getting less "bad girl" attitude and Lucy was still preachy but not as overbearing with it.

So, what was the problem? It was a single word, the word "hiccough". The spelling bothered me a bit but I could have lived with that except for the fact that it must be used about 200 times in this book! Almost every conversation that Lexie has with anyone other than Sister Lucy, her daughter Eva or brother-in-law and cop Otis. The Hiccough is a reflex reaction to tension and I wouldn't mind it being mentioned when she was feeling tense but not only did see mention that the hiccoughs were starting but she inserted the word into every single sentence, or even two or three in between two words of the sentence. It got to the point that I was almost disgusted enough to stop reading the book because of one stupid word. Not only did it pull me out of the story but I was talking *out loud* to the author to "for got sakes get over the stupid hiccoughs and let the character speak a whole sentence." Aaargh!

So, I'm going to have to think long and hard about whether I'll read any more in the series, which is a shame because there is a lot of like about the books.