Thursday, February 2, 2012

Dying for a Dance, Cindy Sample (4 stars)

From Amazon: It takes two to tango--but only one to murder.

Lead-footed single mom, Laurel McKay, agrees to learn a foxtrot routine for her best friend's wedding. After she trips her instructor, crashes into a pair of dancers and breaks the heel of her new shoes, she thinks her evening can't possibly get any worse. Then she stumbles over another dancer. A dead one. With her broken shoe heel stuffed in his mouth.

The action moves from the California Gold Country to Lake Tahoe as Laurel searches for the killer amid the sequins and flying feathers of a ballroom competition. Can she samba her way into the heart of the handsome detective who has once again entered her life? Or will dancing and detecting prove to be a lethal combination?

One, two, three, four. Too many suspects on this dance floor.
Five, six, seven, eight. Find the murderer before it's too late.


Excerpts from my Rebeccas Reads review:

If you like the idea of Dancing with the Stars combined with a murder mystery, you’ll love Dying for a Dance. Laurel McKay is trying to learn a ballroom dance routine for her best friend’s wedding. She has two left feet, but things only go downhill from there. One of the dance instructors is found dead with Laurel’s shoe heel stuffed in his mouth.

I only wish I had read Dying for a Date, the first in this series. I wanted Laurel, as fun as she was, to be more fleshed out. Maybe that was done in the first book, but I don’t know and neither would other readers who picked up this book first. The gap of not knowing is all that kept this from being a five-star read.

My full review can be found at Rebeccas Reads.

*****

This brings me to a question I keep facing as a reviewer: Should books in a series be judged as stand alones or only as part of a series (particularly if read out of order)?

I'd love your thoughts.

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