A Job to Kill For by Janice Kaplan

I'm back to the meat and potatoes of the books I normally read-- mysteries with Kaplan's "A Job to Kill For."

The heroine is interior decorator to a panoply of Los Angeles stars and business executives, and wife of a successful plastic surgeon, Lacy Field. When her college sorority sister and friend, Molly Archer, is accused of murdering the wife of her business partner, Roger Crawford, she asks Lacy Fields to investigate. The cops are sure Archer is having an affair with the husband, though she denies it and Field believes her.

What is absorbing about the book are the variety of suspects interwoven into the plot so that it is not easy to just guess at the real murderer. What I find tiresome is the contant product name dropping that Lacy does. Of course, as an interior decorator she is going to be detail oriented and very familiar with the best name brand merchandise. The book comes across as a running commercial for Jimmy Choo, Louis Vuitton, any number of movies and stars as if just mentioning them in the book is going to make the author commissions. Maybe it does...

Anyway, the commercialism gets tiring even though it helps to set the context for this book and the lives of these characters.

Still, I kept reading for the plot, even though I must confess I could not identify with these characters, and I really did not care what happened to them. I think I might pass on this series in the future in favor of books with more likeable and complex characters.

Liz Nichols