What immediately caught my attention about Mariellen Griffith’s novel Murder at Brews was just the amount of lists that are presented to the reader in the first 50 pages. Every character large or small to the overall plot gets a paragraph description to describe their clothing, mindset, what drink they order at the bar, and just how their day is generally going. This leads to some interesting pros and cons to the story in general, and let’s starts with the pros.
The book takes place in a non-fictional setting with semi-fictional characters. From my understanding most of the characters in the novel are based on real life people. The long list-like descriptions of most characters, whether they are plot needed or not, leads to a fun guessing game for locals who can kind of guess based on surface level description. I will admit to laughing with giddy after Mr. and Mrs. Heartbreak entered Brews under different names because I could recognize them.
In the end though I find that this type of surface level description leaves something to be desired within the story, which is character complexity. We get introduced to a ton of characters but really learn nothing about them. And I find this to carry over to the characters that face the most conflict, Suzette and Phyllis. After reading this book I feel that I still know virtually nothing about them and I feel like this novel sacrifices the fact that people might know who they are for the sake of character complexity and depth. And I feel that problem comes down to I don’t know who Phyllis or Suzette are supposed to represent and the novel makes no attempt to help the reader learn about them.
If you are a local in Eureka I would recommend this book. Especially, if you are heavily involved with other people in town this book quickly becomes a fun game of who’s who. But I am not sure that I could recommend this to someone who is not from around here as the book leaves you in the dust.
There will be a book signing at Brews on Sunday, July 23 from 2 – 5 p.m. Murder at Brews can be bought on amazon for $10 paperback or $4 in eBook format.