Book Review and Giveaway: Small Town Trouble by Jean Erhardt

Disclosure / Disclaimer: I received this book, free of charge, from book tours logo
for review purposes on this blog. No other compensation, monetary or in kind, has been received or implied for this post. Nor was I told how to post about it



Synopsis:
Meet Kim Claypoole, restaurateur, reluctant heroine and amateur sleuth with moxie galore. “I’d had a feeling all along that this wasn’t going to be my day. But I hadn’t been prepared for things to go this badly…”

In Small Town Trouble, the first in a series from mystery writer Jean Erhardt, we get acquainted with Kim Claypoole’s irreverent and witty ways of dealing with the peculiar characters and events that she finds in her life.


Claypoole’s adventure begins as she leaves her home in the Smoky Mountains to help save her kooky mother Evelyn from financial disaster. Setting off to assist Evelyn (i.e., “the other Scarlett O’Hara”) with her newest personal crisis, Claypoole leaves in her wake her Gatlinburg doublewide, her restaurant, The Little Pigeon and her restaurant partner and sometimes best friend Mad Ted Weber as well as a budding secret love affair that’s hotter than an Eskimo in July.


Claypoole’s savior complex leads to more trouble when she bumps into an old flame in her hometown who asks for her help clearing her hapless brother of murder charges. In true Claypoole fashion, she gets more than she bargained for when she gets dragged into a complicated quest to find the true killer complete with topless tavern dancers, small town cops, a stream of backwater characters-even a meeting with the Grim Reaper. Can Claypoole muddle her way through the murky depths of this bizarre murder mystery before it’s too late?


Review:
This was a pretty funny mystery- if you grew up in a small town, especially a Southern one, you will recognize many of the characters and their personality 'quirks'. Most women will be able to relate to Kim's relationship with her mother. Kim is the traditional 'flounderer'- she just flops into one problem after another (especially in her relationship with a married woman!), and how she resolves the mystery at hand, and how it links into all those coincidences makes for an enjoyable afternoon read!


About the Author:
I was raised in the small rural town of Amelia, Ohio, about twenty five miles out of Cincinnati. My younger brother and sister and I had a pony, a horse, many great dogs and a couple of motorcycles. We raised a lot of hell. My father served in The Big One at 17 and, after riding a motorcycle around Europe, became a lawyer and later a judge. My mother worked as a homemaker and nurse, a skill she had to use a lot with all of the injuries my siblings and I subjected ourselves and one another to. We moved to Gatlinburg, and a after graduating from high school, I went on to attend Maryville College in Maryville, Tennessee, a stone's throw from the Great Smoky Mountains. 

In my late 20's I moved to the West Coast to get a broader perspective on life or something like that. I ended up working in retail security, or loss prevention, as it is now known, at an upscale Northwest retailer. I kept getting promoted and with each promotion, the job became less and less fun. It was a lot more fun catching shoplifters than sitting in endless meetings and crunching budgets. After ten years of that, I quit to try my hand at some serious writing, and wrote two books.  it was time to go back to work. I got my private investigator's license and hung out my shingle. Eventually, I moved on to take mostly criminal defense investigation work, it was an interesting ten years. Somewhere in this time period I began to write the Kim Claypoole Mystery Series, which was a great distraction and a lot of fun. I liked the idea of having many of the same characters appear in each book. So here I am now, working on the fifth book in the series. Wish me luck.


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Comments

  1. looks like a great novel, hope to be able to read it, thanks for the chance!

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  2. this would be great and I appreciate print. saubleb(at)gmail(dot)com

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  3. Thanks for taking time out to read and review and for hosting today :)

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  4. This sounds like an interesting story that I would enjoy reading.

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  5. Sounds very intriguing. Thanks for the review and giveaway.
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