Book Review: Crime Writer by Dime Sheppard

  Disclosure / Disclaimer: I received this ebook, free of charge,from Ruby 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. 

***Shortlisted for the Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence in Mystery/Suspense***

Dime Sheppard delivers a smart and witty caper about a crime novelist who recruits her main characters to investigate her maybe-unfaithful fiancé.

Synopsis:

 Evie Howland has problems.

Guns. Bombs. Murderers.

And that's just on the page...

In real life she's meant to be planning a wedding to adorable billionaire Daniel Bradley, but Evie is seriously snarled in the sixteenth book of her successful crime series. In fact, her protagonists are becoming almost impossible to wrangle: NYPD detective Carolyn Harding is volatile after a messy divorce, and Detective Jay Ryan has that heated look in his blue eyes again. They're both sick of being written. And frankly they're getting a little...physical. Evie is beginning to wonder if she's ever going to finish Book Sixteen and get them back into fiction where they belong.

But when a disturbingly familiar homicide surfaces in the city papers, it seems as if other, darker characters might have crossed the fiction-frontier too. In which case, Evie is in a lot of real-life trouble.

If she's going to survive it, Evie must face her own worst fears, and learn that real love can be the best way of writing her own story.

But can she change the ending?

Review:

WOW. Sometimes debut novels can just stun you and this is one of them! Part sarcastic main lead ala Janet Evanovich, a touch of vintage rom com ala Victoria Holt and a bit of suspended belief ala Diana Gabaldon, and you've got a charmer that stays with you long after you finished reading it! Any avid reader can tell you they often wondered if writers feel like their characters are real, and what might happened if they actually WERE real. But to take those ideas and make a page turner of a book from them? Pure genius! There are so many sub-themes, and while most avid readers will soon sense what is going to happen, there are enough twists to keep you reading! It's a charming book and I can definitely see a TV series or movie coming from it, so read it before everyone starts talking about it!

About the Author:

Dime Sheppard is a writer and former barista, film student, waitress, Spanish teacher, vineyard labourer, bilingual interpreter and marketing manager. And some former other stuff. She has a degree in English literature, and also spent seven years working for an NGO, mostly in South America. This means she has diverse skills: she can string a sentence together, and she can also pee in the desert while fending off a baby goat, cook a delicious meal for thirty people with little more than potatoes and oregano, kill a mouse with her bare hands (or a brick, anyway), dig a bogged truck out of metre-deep mud with a broken teacup, and shower in cold water in the dead of winter without a murmur.

 

She loves reading, swimming, and laughing at her dog (who is ridiculous), action movies and eating potato chips for breakfast. She has a weakness for flat whites and fried dumplings and loves a perfect beach day. She's trying to stay determined for achieving a press handstand before she turns a hundred years old, isn’t a natural blonde, puts spiders outside instead of smooshing them, and thinks sweet vegetables and high heels are both unpleasant and unnecessary.

Crime Writer is her first novel, for more info, www.dimesheppard.com