Femmes Fatal

Ellie Haskell Mystery #4

by Dorothy Cannell

Ellie Haskell, her twins four months old, to rejuvenate her marriage, takes a course in the sensual arts. The Fully Female offer naughty nighties and Peach Melba Love Rub. When one student becomes a sex-crazed zombie, another dies in a fatally frothy bubble bath, then a third victim dies, Ellie sets on the trail of a killer.

Cover Artist: Tom Hallman

Genres: Mystery, Cozy Mystery, Fiction, Humor, Cozy, Chick Lit, Crime

279 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

(from Fantastic Fiction online)

Dorothy Cannell was born in London, England, and now lives in Belfast, Maine. Dorothy Cannell writes mysteries featuring Ellie Haskell, interior decorator and Ben Haskell, writer and chef, and Hyacinth and Primrose Tramwell, a pair of dotty sisters and owners of the Flowers Detection Agency.

(from Internet Book List)

Dorothy Cannell, a mother of four, grandmother of ten, and owner of a King Charles Spaniel, was born in England and moved to the United States when she was twenty. After living in Peoria, Illinois, for years, she and her husband recently moved to Belfast, Maine. Her first Ellie Haskell novel, The Thin Woman, was selected as one of the 100 Favorite Mysteries of the Twentieth Century by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association.

Reviews

[Deanne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sad to say this was dumb. Just plain annoying. I enjoyed the first few in this series. Ellie's wit was amusing and the murder mysteries were decent. But this time Ellie's wit was non-stop and it got to be too much. Also some people died but their deaths were glossed over. This wasn't really a murder mystery until the last hour of the book when everything came together and suddenly all the deaths were connected and solved.

[Terry Polston · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favorite Ellie Haskell story. Following 'Widow's Club', it's amazing there are any women left alive in Chitterdon Fells. The woman of the town join a club that teaches them how to seduce their husbands. Unfortunately, they take it too far and the men can't take it. Morning, noon, and night, their ladies are after them. Ellie joins because she is a new mother and is sure her sex appeal has vanished. Freddy continues to be a breath of fresh air.

[DelAnne Frazee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Title: Femmes Fatal - Ellie Haskell Mystery Book 4
Author: Dorothy Cannell
Publisher: Crimeline
Published: 3-28-2012
Pages: 304
Genre: Mystery
Sub-Genre: Cozy, Suspense, Family life, British Detectives
ASIN: B007GZIDME
Reviewed For Myself
Reviewer: DelAnne
Rating: 4.25 Stars


With twins and Merlin's Court to take care of Ellie feels that her love life has gone out. When Mrs. Malloy, depressed and suicidal because of her new love interest is showing no interest in her, Ellie agrees to join Fully Female. Hoping to stoke the fading embers of her love life and keep Mrs. Malloy from leaping off the cliff and to encourage Mrs. M to entice the local mortician. With exercises and Marriage Makeover classes Ellie reluctantly and Mrs. Malloy enthusiastically jump start their love lives. Then their mentor looses her man and her rival dies. Murder once more comes to Chitterton Fells and Ellie is soon on the case and trying to keep her husband's interest.


Femmes Fatal brings a revival of Dorothy Cannell's charming series. With a complex story and a fast pace. Using humor and suspense entwined to have readers giggle as they enjoy the fourth book in the Ellie Haskell mystery series. Well written with strong characters.


My rating of "Femmes Fatal - Ellie Haskell Mystery Book 4" is 4.25 out of 5 stars.


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[Brittany Bowers · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favorite Ellie Haskell. But it was still okay. Bless poor Ellie who is afraid her sex drive has completely dropped off of the face of the Earth, never to return again. (And who's wouldn't with 4 month old twins, washing and drying the diapers by hand because the machine keeps breaking, her husband: the head chef/owner of Abigail's is constantly busy, and she's running around saving people from crazed murders.)
Anyway. What I keep hoping is that at some point Ellie realizes that her worth is far more than a number on a scale. (Although in the first book, she only inherited Merlin's Court by losing weight, so I guess, in that instance her worth was tied to her weight/size.) She still constantly worries about it and I'm hoping one day she'll have a healthier view of her body, if not for herself, for her 2 babies.

[Carmen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed Ellie Haskell a lot in "The Thin Woman".
In this one all the flights of fancy got on my nerves. She just doesn't complete thoughts.. what
I found endearing in the first book just gave me a headache in this one.
Guess the honeymoon is over for me and Ellie too.
In this one, her twins are very young, Merlin has gone someplace with Dorcas, so only Freddy and her cleaning woman are around. Cleaning woman, Mrs. Malloy, and Ellie join some silly women's group to teach them how to get/keep their man.
Bodies start dropping like flies.. pretty easy to guess who the villian is.. coffin, anyone?

[Elizabeth · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't like this book because I couldn't relate to the main character or the things she was doing. The story mainly involved how she handled her home life having a set of 4 month old twins and a husband. The murder plot was secondary. Therefore, to me, this book was boring, not being interested in babies or a troubled marriage. All other characters were on the fringe and their involvement was intermittent. However, I was surprised by the twist at the end and thought that had the author put more into the plot this would have been and excellent book, hence the one star. As it is, I'm just glad it's finished. I won't be reading anymore Ellie Haskell mysteries.

[Bebe · Rating 2 out of 5]

full of waffle and nonsense

They get harder and harder to read. Inserting pages of rubbish ostensibly from “books” characters are reading takes the cake. It’s a lazy and frankly disingenuous way of fluffing pages up. I’m disappointed because I had good hopes, if not high ones for this book. I’d give it a miss if I were you. There’s way too much work in between, obscuring a good story.

[Nancy H · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have read most of the books in this series and have loved them. I somehow missed this one, and in going back to pick it up, I didn't think it was quite as good as all the others in the series. I do love this series, though, and I find the humor and mystery plots very satisfactory.

[Gina Fava · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just too silly.

[Clemmie Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Being Ellie

This series doesn't fell keeping me in stitches, Ellie always finds herself into some kind of mess. Can't stop reading this good series.

[Celeste Arms]

did not finish..did not like

[Sonja Trokey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Always great characters, especially Ellie and Ben, Jason and others.

[Kelly Chester · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a great book

[Linda · Rating 1 out of 5]

I slogged through this one because I'm waiting for books I ordered from the library to arrive. It was just too tedious.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoy this author . Her writing style is fun to read.

[Lyn Soulia-Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

May be a good book, just not my choice

[Marilyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like this series, but this one was just utterly silly.

[A.J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

12 chapters/422 pages

Book Summary—Ellie Haskell’s the mother of four-month-old twins, and she feels as if her love life’s grown flabby and stale—or is that how SHE feels, physically? Anyhow, reluctantly, she decides to join Chitterton Fells’s new ladies’ “club”: Fully Female. Inside its hallowed walls lies the cure for any and every marital woe—that is, if the woe involves sex or romance. But what Ellie finds is not what she bargained for: lying to Ben, her husband, oversexed females and exhausted-by-the-all-to-frequent-call-to-sex husbands, and more deaths than she can shake a baby rattle at. No matter how good for one’s sex life Fully Female may be, it appears to be hazards to one’s life, including Ellie’s.

My Review—Good grief. I don’t know if I’ve matured since I read the last novel or if this one was just beyond endurance because it was so silly, but I didn’t enjoy it as I usually do. The only character who didn’t bother me was Bentley Haskell. He seemed the only sane one in the whole story.

As to Ellie’s issue: Why go to a bunch of strange women for help? Why not just go to your husband and talk it out? Or, if you’re embarrassed to humble yourself and tell him you’re feeling fat and unsexy right now, why not “do unto others”? After all, having kids will change things in a marriage until you get used to it. Any big event will throw off-balance your status quo, so you have to believe your husband’s feeling his own sense of “TILT!” so why not just start praising him verbally, doing little things to let him know you love him and still find him sexy? Men such as Bentley Haskell would eventually either take the hint or would simply respond in kind. I didn’t get all the secrecies and trickeries, et al, in these sorts of stories. After all, Ellie eventually does spurt to Ben how she’s been feeling and, being Ben, he holds her and tells her how much he adores her in his sweet way. Then, later, once he’s learned the full truth from their help, Mrs. Malloy, he opens up to Ellie about how he’s been fearing he’s lost his appeal to her because she hasn’t wanted to be romantic or have sex.

It was a silly pot. Almost as if one can’t write about sex, especially married sex, without resorting to farcical storylines that are, if not puerile, the definitely sophomorically juvenile.

I’ll read the next in the series to see if it was this particular story I didn’t like or if maybe I have “grown out of” the Ellie Haskell series.

Grade: B

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the 5th book in a series of mysteries by Dorothy Cannell. Ellie Haskell is an insecure, self deprecating interior designer. Ellie is married to Ben who is her drop-dead gorgeous husband and father to her recently born twins. Ellie, feeling less than attractive finds herself joining a group called Fully Female that attempts to give guidance and counsel to insecure females in the more intimate aspects of their lives.
What begins to happen in their small community is that members of this group of women begin dying off in rather unusual circumstances. Ellie happens to be an innocent witness to a couple of these occurrences and decides she needs to get to the bottom of what is going on around her. These books are written with a good deal of wit and satire and I find myself chuckling and even laughing out loud at times in these stories. I have read a lot of mysteries and enjoy the genre very much. I like this series because they are written with a sense of humor and a feel for the foibles of human beings.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

British mystery set in small coastal town. Another in the Ellie Haskell mystery series. In this story, Ellie and other women in Chitterton Falls, enroll in a woman's group, Fully Female, designed to help them rekindle their marriages. A good idea appears to turn bad when either women in the group or their husbands start dying in some amusing ways. Ellie helps unravel the mystery with a number of twists and turns along the way.

Story line is good, though I find the Ellie character a bit tiring with her flippancy and wise crack remarks which contribute to the humor for some, but I am not one of them. In this story, Ellie is the new mother of twins and struggling with the demands of caring for them, though she has help from her husband, cousin, and cleaning woman. Still Ellie has troubles managing along with the belief that she is no longer attractive. While all this is suppose to contribute to the novel's humor, I find it tiring.

[Eunira · Rating 3 out of 5]

Once Ellie Haskell's life was a fairy tale: the one about the overweight, underpaid interior designer who falls rapturously in love with a gorgeous prince and lives happily ever after. But now, four months after the birth of her twins, her worst nightmare has come true: the princess has turned into a frog and the bliss has gone out of the bedroom.
Can a course in the sensual arts, featuring naughty nighties and Peach Melba Love Rub, rekindle the romance she and her adored Bentley once shared? It's a question that leads Ellie straight to an organization called Fully Female.
But before she can say "Marriage Makeover," one fellow vamp becomes a sex-crazed zombie and another meets her end in a fatally frothy bubble bath. Then a third victim of amour turns up dead, and Ellie realizes it's more than ill luck. Can Ellie catch a crazed killer before love gets a bad name.

[Anne Hawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another good mystery from Dorothy Cannell. Poor Ellie is suffering in her marriage after the birth of her twins and think it needs some spice. Unfortunately, the Fully Female group she joins has a lot bigger problems than hers. The male part of the equations seem to be coming to a bad end.

Ellie's friend and housekeeper begins to really come into her own in this book. I lover her character and she adds a lot to the series.

[Kim · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really couldn't wait to finish this book. I've read others in this series and found them silly, but kind of fun (and, of course, they take place in England, so how bad could they be?). This one was less than silly - it was stupid and incoherent and I found the inexplicably archaic language truly irritating. It's odd, because I find the same thing charming in Charlotte MacLeod's Sarah Kelling mysteries.

[Jamielyn M · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wouldn't really consider this a murder mystery, as the actual murder didn't take place until the very end. Having said that you pretty much knew the murderer before it occurred. The big problem I have is I really doubt the author had twins. If she did she must have has A LOT of help, because no one has time for any of that, nor that much energy with 4 month old twin. From experience. It was a bit eye rolling, and frustrating for me, even with it being fiction.

[Kathie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't like books that have loads of characters that you have to keep track of. As this is the 5th book in the series I have read I know the main characters but there were so many new ones to keep track of and who was dead and who wasn't got to be confusing.

[Gail · Rating 4 out of 5]

a little racier... but cute

[Peggy · Rating 4 out of 5]

We've all been there thinking that we need to spice it up. Lots of fun

[T · Rating 1 out of 5]

didn't finish

[Lizzytish · Rating 4 out of 5]

another enjoyable Ellie book

[Deborah · Rating 3 out of 5]

A cozy mystery featuring Ellie Haskell. Ellie, a woman who is constantly worrying about her weight, is an untypical heroine. A fun, light cozy mystery read. Great to take to the beach.