Book Review: Board to Death by Amy Barkman, Debbie Roome & Gretchen Anderson
Disclosure: I received this book as part of the Firstreads giveaway program on the premise that I would write a review of it.
As the subtitle says, this is a set of three mystery stories linked by the theme of games. It’s double-spaced with fairly large type, so the book was a fast read.
The protagonists are all older women (“baby boomers” as the blurb puts it) and the stories double as romances as each of them finds love as well as danger. The stories are competently written, although only one of them is a “fair play” mystery that the reader can solve with the given information. The links between the stories as the games go from one person to another might seem a bit too “cute” to more cynical readers.
Which leads to the next thing I should talk about. All of the protagonists, like their authors, are practicing Christians. This leads to rather more God-talk than most cozies contain. I was comfortable with this, but I know many readers might find it intrusive or off-putting.
A peculiarity of the stories is that there’s only two religion settings for characters: practicing non-denominational Christian and entirely secular. This is pointed up by one of the secular characters calling people who go to church of a Sunday and pray at appropriate moments “religious fanatics.” Clearly, she’s never met any real religious fanatics…such as those who would ban board games from their homes for leading to gambling.
And a generally conservative worldview predominates. The motive for one of the deaths caught me by total surprise because it was old-fashioned, almost quaint.
I’d recommend this book most to Christian “cozy” fans, and older romance literature fans.
