If Books Could Kill by Kate Eberle
When Roxie makes a tongue-in-cheek wish to live out the plot of her favorite author’s next novel, she has romance in mind — namely, the sweet, safe, swoon-worthy storylines Anna Matthews is known for. It should be a dream come true when her wish is granted and she finds herself swept into a first date with a handsome stranger who seems designed to take her breath away. Except for one little hiccup: That handsome stranger tries to take her breath away. Literally. With a knife. The thing is, Roxie may be the new Anna Matthews protagonist — but this time, Anna is writing a crime thriller.
by Damla
“Sometimes, the real villain of the story is the author.”
By now, you might have heard that I love a good “character sucked into their favorite novel” plot line (OK, fine, yes, I am yet again talking about This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me), and this one is a great one to add to the list.
When Roxie jokingly makes a lighthearted wish to become one of her favorite author’s heroines, she is hoping for a swoon-worthy, old time-y romance with a happily ever after. And when she meets an entirely too charming man, it appears that her wish just may have come true. What she doesn’t take into account is that her favorite romance author is now writing a murder mystery instead.
Just the premise of the book was enough to hook me, and I am glad that it did, because this turned out to be a highly entertaining, laugh-out-loud funny romcom-meets-thriller. The set-up is hilarious, the characters are quirky, and it has a fast pacing as you would expect from a murder mystery. The humor (and the romance) is also very meta, given the circumstances our main character finds herself in, and it makes for very funny situations.
To begin with, Roxie finds the possibility of a Hallmark-style romance happening to her almost as horrifying as the attempted murder. This might seem like a contradiction to her love of romance books and her wish (and it is), but she does make for a very entertaining protagonist with the resulting tension and her fighting the romantic attraction all the way through the adventure. She also makes some very questionable choices and face-palm worthy decisions, but rather than annoying me, it was just exceedingly entertaining in a hard-to-look-away-from-a-disaster kind of way.
That being said, it is a rather difficult feat to pull of a thriller at the same time as a romance infused with humor, but this book took a decent stab at it in my opinion (ha). Unfortunately, the plot couldn’t quite deliver anything genuinely thrilling on the murder-mystery front, creating more of a quirky cozy mystery with a few gory details sprinkled throughout, but it does compensate with the romantic plot. In my opinion, just ignore the plot holes around the murders and enjoy the ride because it is a very entertaining one.
And I cannot close off this review without adding one last important-to-me-but-irrelevant-to-the-plot point: Murder at a library? Where you could get blood and slash marks all over the books?? I know that serial killers were monsters, but this really crosses the line.
