Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A mystery writer’s celebration of the 10th anniversary of her fact-based debut novel entangles her in—spoiler alert—another murder. A decade ago, Eleanor Dash partnered with dashing private eye Connor Smith to bring down an Italian crime family. Flushed with success, she wrote When in Rome, a novel in which she changed her name but not Connor’s; he responded by demanding 10% of her advance and then, when the book turned out to be a success, 20% for the eight novels in the series she’s published since then. Now a mystery tour of Italy, during which she hopes to work on her latest, Amalfi Made Me Do It, has reunited Eleanor and Connor, along with Harper Dash, the younger sister whose dreams of publishing her own novels have been put on hold indefinitely while she works as Eleanor’s assistant; Allison Smith, the ex-wife Connor hid from Eleanor during their romance back then; Oliver Forrest, the boyfriend Eleanor replaced with Connor at the time; and several other mystery novelists and their fans, including Crazy Cathy, who’s so persistent in her attentions that Eleanor has served her with an injunction. Eleanor loves her career, loves Italy, and loves both Connor and Oliver. Mainly, though, she loves herself and her prowess as a mysterymonger who turns out to be a lot less tricky than her models. Readers with a taste for self-reflexive self-infatuation are advised to skip the story proper—which takes an unconscionably long time to produce a corpse and even longer before Eleanor reviews the evidence and comes up with the wrong conclusion—and just read the 237 footnotes, many of them referencing other footnotes. How adorable is that? Brightly written piffle. To use the heroine’s own bugaboo assessment: Meh. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.