So, I have been planning to start recaps for a series of Cozy Mystery books known as the Jaine Austen series. I'm going for a snarky sort of tone as Jaine herself has snark to spare, but I worry I'm going too into detail. Any tips to help me trim the fat would be appreciated. For sake of reference, here's what I have so far for the first book of the series, "This Pen For Hire".
"In Los Angeles, a woman fresh from the shower answers her door in a silk kimono. It appears her client has arrived an hour earlier than their appointment. No matter. She welcomes him in anyway. He's a rather geeky type, and he's nervous. He's never done this before, so much so that he confirms that her fee is $50 an hour. She tells him to get comfortable and take a seat.
No, you're not about to read about the sexual escapades of a prostitute, but rather the sleuthing of writer-for-hire Jaine Austen. Yes, she's aware of how much her name sounds like that other writer with the surname Austen. No relation, she just has an Anglophile mother who is also not a great speller.
Anyway, Jaine is a writer, one who got out of the advertising business to start a writing service out of her apartment called This Pen for Hire. She mostly writes letters, brochures, other ads, and plenty of personals. But a letter is what Jaine's client, Howard Murdoch, is here for (after he almost sits on Jaine's cat, the ever snarky Prozac). Specifically, a love letter to Stacy Lawrence, an aerobics instructor at his gym. She's blonde, beautiful, and fit as a fiddle. She's also a woman Howard's shared all of... zero syllables with. Jaine has her hesitations about the job, especially given that Howard works in the ever so not riveting field of adjusting insurance claims and has hobbies of watching TV and collecting chopsticks from Chinese restaurants with his mother (who he also lives with). Despite her initial misgivings, however, Jaine decides to go through and take the gig. Admittedly this is because Howard plans to pay her triple her rate, but she does take it. Hey, she's got bills to pay and a half decent apartment with high rent she needs to live in.
Part of the “half” there is due to her rather nosy neighbor, Neiman Marcus shoe salesman Lance Venable. The man can be rather cranky, something not helped by the fact that he has hearing the Man of Steel would be jealous of and tends to hear everything Jaine does in her apartment through the paper thin walls.
As Jaine struggles making Howard sound appealing to the beautiful blonde, she decides a good way to clear her head is to go on a dinner date. Don't get your hopes up for Jaine getting romance, the dinner is with her best friend, Kandi Toblowski.
Jaine met Kandi about five years back in a UCLA screenwriting course. Kandi was a New Yorker looking to get into TV writing, Jaine... OK, Jaine needed a reason to get out of her apartment once a week. The two bonded over Kandi's chutzpah (which by international law probably comes with being a New Yorker) and their mutual hatred of the instructor, and have been thick as thieves ever since.
Kandi has news for Jaine; she has found her Mr. Right... for about the umpteenth time. Last time, it was a dentist who threatened to throw her off the Santa Monica Pier. This time is different, however. Her new Mr. Right is a doctor she met through a photo dating service with the stunning good looks of Antonio Banderas. Jaine is having her doubts, partly because of her own lousy four-years-too-long marriage to her ex husband, The Blob (as she calls him).
Kandi actually does help Jaine out of her funk with writing Howard's letter by offering her a chance to write for a cockroach. As in “Beanie and the Cockroach”, the Saturday morning cartoon she writes on about a short-order cook named Beanie and his pet cockroach Fred. An hour or so spent with Kandi pitching ideas about a cockroach makes writing a love letter to a stranger look much much easier.
Write, Jaine does, coming up with a rather sweet letter. The only caveat is the tiny little white lie Jaine put in that Howard is the nephew of Rupert Murdoch. Yes, that one. Not that Howard knows who that is, the little dork. Howard is also not too willing to lie to Stacy, as he his sure she's not the gold digging type (while Jaine is positive she is). But with some coaxing from Jaine, Howard delivers his letter, and three days later, happily informs Jaine he's gotten a date. It's even on Valentine's Day, the first date he's ever had on that holiday.
With that spring in her step, Jaine heads off to her own date on Valentine's Day. Again, no romance, but rather the Shalom Retirement Home, where she teaches a memoir writing class to the residents once a week. True, she's not getting novel-worthystories out of this crowd of older women, but she does love it so all the same. The only fly in the ointment not being used by the residents is the one male student of the class, Abe Goldman. The old timer has a crush on Jaine that doesn't seem to get the countless hints that she isn't interested in dating him, or her lack of enthusiasm for his memoirs, “My Life as a Carpet Salesman”.
After her class, Jaine does her favorite thing in the world: soak in the tub. She does her best thinking there. It's where she decided to divorce the Blob, and where she came up with possibly her best slogan (“In a rush to flush? Call Toiletmasters!” for Toiletmasters Plumbing, one of her top clients). Her relaxing night topped off with TV takes a sharp nosedive, however, where she comes upon a news report of Howard being arrested for the brutal murder of Stacy Lawrence.
Jaine visits Howard in jail, sure that while Howard may be an awkward geek, he isn't a murderer. Howard tells her he came to Stacy's apartment for their date, finding her door open. He waited in her foyer for a bit, but when she still didn't show, he went to her bedroom, waiting their long enough to smell her perfume. He eventually turned on the lights, finding her bloody corpse. He tried to revive her, only for the police to find him covered in her blood. With his choice of legal counsel being his disbarred cousin or someone he found in the Yellowpages, Howard's chances of being proven innocent don't seem high.
As Jaine is leaving she's accosted by Timothy Rea, the detective working Stacy's murder. He confronts her on the crock about Howard being related to Rupert Murdoch in the love letter. Jaine does cop to that, but she insists Howard is innocent of such a heinous crime. Rea sticks to what he knows for certain; Howard was found covered in Stacy's blood and standing over her body, with the bloody Thighmaster used to bludgeon Stacy to death in his hands.
Yes, you read that right, a Thighmaster. Certainly an interesting way to die.
Add Howard's history of being hospitalized for mental illnesses (those being anorexia and depression, if you're curious), and Howard looks like a slam dunk to Detective Rea. But Jaine is still not convinced, and if Rea is any indication of how the LAPD is handling things, Jaine decides she'll have to take matters into her own hands if she wants to prove the poor sap innocent.
Arriving at Stacy's apartment complex, Bentley Gardens, Jaine sets to talk to the next door neighbor who called the police. She gets into the place when a cute guy in a Jeep unlocks the door, Jaine holding it open for him due to his arms being bogged down with suitcases. As he gets into his apartment, Jaine gets to the neighbor's, but is stopped in her tracks by the building manager, Daryush Kolchev. Luckily, she's able to bluff him into thinking she's a reporter with the New York Times. With this in mind, Daryush seems to gush about what a good tenant Stacy was, with Jaine suspecting a crush on the gorgeous blonde is painting his image of her a bit. The big Russian lug didn't see anyone outside of Howard, and didn't see much else, as he was watching the Home Shopping Network with his wife, who calls him over for more shopping. As he leaves, Jaine notices Mrs. Kolchev isn't the most attractive woman, and theorizes that she may have grown jealous of Stacy due to her husband's crush, deciding to crush the trainer's skull with a Thighmaster.
Moving onto the neighbor that called the police, Elaine Zimmer, Jaine (this time lying that she is a lawyer hired for Howard after Elaine doesn't fall for the Times routine) learns that Stacy's apartment was supposed to go to Elaine after the previous tenant passed away three weeks prior, but Daryush gave it to Stacy instead. This did not sit well with the UCLA psych ward nurse, who already thought of Stacy as a manipulative bitch. As Jaine leaves her apartment, she notices an odd stain on Zimmer's laundry that looks a lot like blood.
Jaine decides she should likely look at the crime scene, but finds it locked. Since she made the rather amateur decision of checking the knob with ungloved hands, Jaine is in the process of wiping her fingerprints clean when she comes across the cute guy who got her into the building earlier. Cue lie number three from Jaine, saying she's with the police (but hey, she did just come from the department...). Cutie is shocked to hear about Stacy's murder, while Jaine is shocked at how attractive he is. She gets into the guy's apartment to ask him some questions.
She learns he is antiques dealer Cameron Bannick, but since he's spent the last month in San Francisco on a business trip, he can't offer much info on the murder. He's also surprised over the murder, as that business trip means he missed Stacy move into that apartment from the 6th one she used to live in. The most he can tell Jaine is that Stacy was close to the apartment's previous tenant, former B-movie actress Marian Hamilton, a woman who thrived in the 40's and 50's, and a great source of acting advice for the aspiring starlet (because what beautiful blonde woman isn't hoping to be an actress living in LA?). The late Hamilton was also a good friend to Cameron before her passing.
Jaine gets a idea in her head about her new crush. After all, owning an antique shop, platonically friends with an older woman, and being single despite his good looks paints the picture that Cameron is batting for the same team...note We know, we know, but it was 2002 when this book came out, OK? However, Jaine is here to solve a murder, and thanks to Cameron learns of two new suspects: Stacy's ex-boyfriend, an actor she dropped to hook up with a big shot agent, and a fellow trainer at her work who she stole said agent boyfriend from. Cameron doesn't know their names, but he does know that the trainer's name is some sort of flower. He also knows there's a showing of one of Marion's films coming up soon, and he invites Jaine to see it with him. She is glad to go out with him, though time will tell if it's a date or not.
Jaine meets up with Kandi again, who has some venting to do about her date. If you guessed that a date with a man that looks like Antonio Banderas was too good to be true, you were dead on. The guy Kandi actually met used a photo of the actor for his profile, is actually a doctor of phrenology, and their date was to a McDonald's. But Kandi Toblowski's not the type to let something like this get her down. She's already come up with a new way to meet guys; going to auction houses. Jaine relates to her all that she's learned so far, from the murder, to Cameron, to how she's getting some newfound excitement in her life from this investigating. Kandi supports her friend, of course, and does point out that Cameron could easily have hopped a plane to LA, bumped Stacy off, and gotten back in no time flat. With this in mind, Jaine calls up Cameron's hotel to check. The owner, a Miss Garrity, says Cameron was there the whole night, as he was sitting alone at their Valentine's dance the whole night. With her new beau in the clear, Jaine decides her next move is finding this “flower” trainer at the L.A. Sports Club."
Again, I'm positive I'm adding too much detail, but figure detail is important for recapping a mystery.
So, I have been planning to start recaps for a series of Cozy Mystery books known as the Jaine Austen series. I'm going for a snarky sort of tone as Jaine herself has snark to spare, but I worry I'm going too into detail. Any tips to help me trim the fat would be appreciated. For sake of reference, here's what I have so far for the first book of the series, "This Pen For Hire".
"In Los Angeles, a woman fresh from the shower answers her door in a silk kimono. It appears her client has arrived an hour earlier than their appointment. No matter. She welcomes him in anyway. He's a rather geeky type, and he's nervous. He's never done this before, so much so that he confirms that her fee is $50 an hour. She tells him to get comfortable and take a seat.
No, you're not about to read about the sexual escapades of a prostitute, but rather the sleuthing of writer-for-hire Jaine Austen. Yes, she's aware of how much her name sounds like that other writer with the surname Austen. No relation, she just has an Anglophile mother who is also not a great speller.
Anyway, Jaine is a writer, one who got out of the advertising business to start a writing service out of her apartment called This Pen for Hire. She mostly writes letters, brochures, other ads, and plenty of personals. But a letter is what Jaine's client, Howard Murdoch, is here for (after he almost sits on Jaine's cat, the ever snarky Prozac). Specifically, a love letter to Stacy Lawrence, an aerobics instructor at his gym. She's blonde, beautiful, and fit as a fiddle. She's also a woman Howard's shared all of... zero syllables with. Jaine has her hesitations about the job, especially given that Howard works in the ever so not riveting field of adjusting insurance claims and has hobbies of watching TV and collecting chopsticks from Chinese restaurants with his mother (who he also lives with). Despite her initial misgivings, however, Jaine decides to go through and take the gig. Admittedly this is because Howard plans to pay her triple her rate, but she does take it. Hey, she's got bills to pay and a half decent apartment with high rent she needs to live in.
Part of the “half” there is due to her rather nosy neighbor, Neiman Marcus shoe salesman Lance Venable. The man can be rather cranky, something not helped by the fact that he has hearing the Man of Steel would be jealous of and tends to hear everything Jaine does in her apartment through the paper thin walls.
As Jaine struggles making Howard sound appealing to the beautiful blonde, she decides a good way to clear her head is to go on a dinner date. Don't get your hopes up for Jaine getting romance, the dinner is with her best friend, Kandi Toblowski.
Jaine met Kandi about five years back in a UCLA screenwriting course. Kandi was a New Yorker looking to get into TV writing, Jaine... OK, Jaine needed a reason to get out of her apartment once a week. The two bonded over Kandi's chutzpah (which by international law probably comes with being a New Yorker) and their mutual hatred of the instructor, and have been thick as thieves ever since.
Kandi has news for Jaine; she has found her Mr. Right... for about the umpteenth time. Last time, it was a dentist who threatened to throw her off the Santa Monica Pier. This time is different, however. Her new Mr. Right is a doctor she met through a photo dating service with the stunning good looks of Antonio Banderas. Jaine is having her doubts, partly because of her own lousy four-years-too-long marriage to her ex husband, The Blob (as she calls him).
Kandi actually does help Jaine out of her funk with writing Howard's letter by offering her a chance to write for a cockroach. As in “Beanie and the Cockroach”, the Saturday morning cartoon she writes on about a short-order cook named Beanie and his pet cockroach Fred. An hour or so spent with Kandi pitching ideas about a cockroach makes writing a love letter to a stranger look much much easier.
Write, Jaine does, coming up with a rather sweet letter. The only caveat is the tiny little white lie Jaine put in that Howard is the nephew of Rupert Murdoch. Yes, that one. Not that Howard knows who that is, the little dork. Howard is also not too willing to lie to Stacy, as he his sure she's not the gold digging type (while Jaine is positive she is). But with some coaxing from Jaine, Howard delivers his letter, and three days later, happily informs Jaine he's gotten a date. It's even on Valentine's Day, the first date he's ever had on that holiday.
With that spring in her step, Jaine heads off to her own date on Valentine's Day. Again, no romance, but rather the Shalom Retirement Home, where she teaches a memoir writing class to the residents once a week. True, she's not getting novel-worthystories out of this crowd of older women, but she does love it so all the same. The only fly in the ointment not being used by the residents is the one male student of the class, Abe Goldman. The old timer has a crush on Jaine that doesn't seem to get the countless hints that she isn't interested in dating him, or her lack of enthusiasm for his memoirs, “My Life as a Carpet Salesman”.
After her class, Jaine does her favorite thing in the world: soak in the tub. She does her best thinking there. It's where she decided to divorce the Blob, and where she came up with possibly her best slogan (“In a rush to flush? Call Toiletmasters!” for Toiletmasters Plumbing, one of her top clients). Her relaxing night topped off with TV takes a sharp nosedive, however, where she comes upon a news report of Howard being arrested for the brutal murder of Stacy Lawrence.
Jaine visits Howard in jail, sure that while Howard may be an awkward geek, he isn't a murderer. Howard tells her he came to Stacy's apartment for their date, finding her door open. He waited in her foyer for a bit, but when she still didn't show, he went to her bedroom, waiting their long enough to smell her perfume. He eventually turned on the lights, finding her bloody corpse. He tried to revive her, only for the police to find him covered in her blood. With his choice of legal counsel being his disbarred cousin or someone he found in the Yellowpages, Howard's chances of being proven innocent don't seem high.
As Jaine is leaving she's accosted by Timothy Rea, the detective working Stacy's murder. He confronts her on the crock about Howard being related to Rupert Murdoch in the love letter. Jaine does cop to that, but she insists Howard is innocent of such a heinous crime. Rea sticks to what he knows for certain; Howard was found covered in Stacy's blood and standing over her body, with the bloody Thighmaster used to bludgeon Stacy to death in his hands.
Yes, you read that right, a Thighmaster. Certainly an interesting way to die.
Add Howard's history of being hospitalized for mental illnesses (those being anorexia and depression, if you're curious), and Howard looks like a slam dunk to Detective Rea. But Jaine is still not convinced, and if Rea is any indication of how the LAPD is handling things, Jaine decides she'll have to take matters into her own hands if she wants to prove the poor sap innocent.
Arriving at Stacy's apartment complex, Bentley Gardens, Jaine sets to talk to the next door neighbor who called the police. She gets into the place when a cute guy in a Jeep unlocks the door, Jaine holding it open for him due to his arms being bogged down with suitcases. As he gets into his apartment, Jaine gets to the neighbor's, but is stopped in her tracks by the building manager, Daryush Kolchev. Luckily, she's able to bluff him into thinking she's a reporter with the New York Times. With this in mind, Daryush seems to gush about what a good tenant Stacy was, with Jaine suspecting a crush on the gorgeous blonde is painting his image of her a bit. The big Russian lug didn't see anyone outside of Howard, and didn't see much else, as he was watching the Home Shopping Network with his wife, who calls him over for more shopping. As he leaves, Jaine notices Mrs. Kolchev isn't the most attractive woman, and theorizes that she may have grown jealous of Stacy due to her husband's crush, deciding to crush the trainer's skull with a Thighmaster.
Moving onto the neighbor that called the police, Elaine Zimmer, Jaine (this time lying that she is a lawyer hired for Howard after Elaine doesn't fall for the Times routine) learns that Stacy's apartment was supposed to go to Elaine after the previous tenant passed away three weeks prior, but Daryush gave it to Stacy instead. This did not sit well with the UCLA psych ward nurse, who already thought of Stacy as a manipulative bitch. As Jaine leaves her apartment, she notices an odd stain on Zimmer's laundry that looks a lot like blood.
Jaine decides she should likely look at the crime scene, but finds it locked. Since she made the rather amateur decision of checking the knob with ungloved hands, Jaine is in the process of wiping her fingerprints clean when she comes across the cute guy who got her into the building earlier. Cue lie number three from Jaine, saying she's with the police (but hey, she did just come from the department...). Cutie is shocked to hear about Stacy's murder, while Jaine is shocked at how attractive he is. She gets into the guy's apartment to ask him some questions.
She learns he is antiques dealer Cameron Bannick, but since he's spent the last month in San Francisco on a business trip, he can't offer much info on the murder. He's also surprised over the murder, as that business trip means he missed Stacy move into that apartment from the 6th one she used to live in. The most he can tell Jaine is that Stacy was close to the apartment's previous tenant, former B-movie actress Marian Hamilton, a woman who thrived in the 40's and 50's, and a great source of acting advice for the aspiring starlet (because what beautiful blonde woman isn't hoping to be an actress living in LA?). The late Hamilton was also a good friend to Cameron before her passing.
Jaine gets a idea in her head about her new crush. After all, owning an antique shop, platonically friends with an older woman, and being single despite his good looks paints the picture that Cameron is batting for the same team...note However, Jaine is here to solve a murder, and thanks to Cameron learns of two new suspects: Stacy's ex-boyfriend, an actor she dropped to hook up with a big shot agent, and a fellow trainer at her work who she stole said agent boyfriend from. Cameron doesn't know their names, but he does know that the trainer's name is some sort of flower. He also knows there's a showing of one of Marion's films coming up soon, and he invites Jaine to see it with him. She is glad to go out with him, though time will tell if it's a date or not.
Jaine meets up with Kandi again, who has some venting to do about her date. If you guessed that a date with a man that looks like Antonio Banderas was too good to be true, you were dead on. The guy Kandi actually met used a photo of the actor for his profile, is actually a doctor of phrenology, and their date was to a McDonald's. But Kandi Toblowski's not the type to let something like this get her down. She's already come up with a new way to meet guys; going to auction houses. Jaine relates to her all that she's learned so far, from the murder, to Cameron, to how she's getting some newfound excitement in her life from this investigating. Kandi supports her friend, of course, and does point out that Cameron could easily have hopped a plane to LA, bumped Stacy off, and gotten back in no time flat. With this in mind, Jaine calls up Cameron's hotel to check. The owner, a Miss Garrity, says Cameron was there the whole night, as he was sitting alone at their Valentine's dance the whole night. With her new beau in the clear, Jaine decides her next move is finding this “flower” trainer at the L.A. Sports Club."
Again, I'm positive I'm adding too much detail, but figure detail is important for recapping a mystery.