Book Review: The King Falls by R.J. Lee

Disclosure / Disclaimer: I received this ebook, free of charge ,from kensington Books via #Netgalley 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. All opinions are my own.

In R.J. Lee’s fourth Mississippi-set Bridge to Death Mystery, it’s up to newly-married reporter and bridge player Wendy Winchester Rierson to finesse a homicide investigation where the killer holds a master hand…

Synopsis:

King Kohl, scion of the Kohl and Son real estate firm, has a reputation for loving three things: the ladies, closing on properties, and playing bridge. Still, when he invites Wendy, the president of the Rosalie, Mississippi, Country Club Bridge Bunch, to a small, exclusive bridge party, her investigative instincts as a reporter for the Rosalie Citizen are on the alert. In fact, King means to use the occasion to make a surprising announcement to his selected guests. But before he can lay his cards on the table, tragedy strikes.

 
After receiving a mysterious message to hurry to King’s home, Wendy almost collides with the man’s real-estate rival, running out the front door insisting he found King dead when he arrived. Not just dead, it turns out, but murdered—crowned with one of his own award plaques.
 

Is the rival as guilty as he looks? Was it a crime of passion by one of Kohl’s scorned lovers? With her detective husband Ross and her father Bax Winchester, the chief of police, Wendy is determined to find the offender who dropped the unguarded King…

Review:

This is the 4th book in the series, and maybe coming into late was part of the problem. For me the start was sooooooo slow, I had to keep putting it down, and trying a few more pages at a time. It eventually picked up speed, but honestly by then, I wasn't connected to the characters, but rather saw them as 'set pieces' that moved the mystery on. Not sure if it was the storyline, or just the slow start. The mystery was decent with the right amount of red herrings for a cozy, it just ended up not being my cup of tea,,,

About the Author:

R. J. Lee follows in the mystery-writing footsteps of his father, R. Keene Lee, who wrote fighter pilot and detective stories for Fiction House, publishers of Wings Magazine and other pulp fiction periodicals in the late '40s and '50s. Lee was born and grew up in the Mississippi River port of Natchez but also spent thirty years living in the Crescent City of New Orleans. A graduate of the University of the South (Sewanee) where he studied creative writing under Sewanee Review editor, Andrew Lytle, Lee now resides in Oxford, Mississippi.