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Gina Lopez is 26, a postal worker during the week, a mud wrestler on weekends. She's also a recent widow, though she is not exactly mourning the death of her abusive husband Chico. Instead, she's anxiously awaiting the life-insurance settlement that will pay off his gambling debts. After that she's hoping to take her mud-wrestling skills out of small-town-Ontario bars and down to the more lucrative U.S. circuit. And then Marcia Beekland enters her life. Marcia has video evidence that appears to implicate Gina in Chico's death. Faced with the likelihood of a jail sentence and the certain loss of the insurance settlement, Gina succumbs to Marcia's blackmail demands. And what Marcia wants is that Gina kill her husband Stanley. What follows is a comic mystery caper that will keep readers both laughing and eagerly reading to discover what is really behind Marcia's increasingly crazed demands.… (more)
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You get a strangely amusing romp through
As a fast read, this book flew by - it reads well and is funny in parts, absurd in others. There are lengthy descriptions of the mud-wrestling bouts, which made me feel soggy, and rather less effort making the reader want to cheer for Gina as she goes through the various murder attempts. The best character, by far, is the blackmailer Marcia Beekland. She's the one I'd like to meet, with her waspish tongue and generally horrid approach to life.
It's always a problem in mysteries when the antagonist is a more interesting character than the protagonist. Gina comes off as rather two-dimensional and the capers in the book are light enough to seem "cheap and common" as my old mum would say. Her motivation for heading out to kill a stranger in a fairly brutal way isn't convincing. I'd like to see the whole thing either ramped up to the truly absurd or taken down to the significant - here the story falters in a blandness that takes away most of its charm.
And it could be funny. It's just that the capers are so familiar. Seems made-for-TV.
This is the story of Gina, a postal clerk and
It is decently written and the story does go full circle. And you might even like Gina enough to actually care what happens to her. That being said, however, I have to say that I didn't find the story content particularly believable and Gina's behavior was abnormal - I don't see how one can go from mud-wrestling to attempting murder and then back to mud-wrestling without some sort of internal disturbance. That, and anyone who has watched any CSI would know that her attempts at murder either wouldn't have worked in the first place, or would have left enough evidence that she would have been caught for it. Perhaps the "murder" she was being blackmailed about would have carried a lighter sentence (self-defense) than murder-for-hire would...
Anyway, I think it was a decently written story, it just wasn't deep enough, or meaningful enough for me.
As expected, I was able to finish the book within the evening. It had slower parts, and faster-paced parts, but as it moved towards its
The book had its humourous moments (intentional, or otherwise), and was fairly well-written. Despite my lack of interest in the hobby of mud-wrestling, it was quite good (the mud-wrestling wasn't a huge part of the story). Lots of local references to places and establishments in Ontario, Canada.
Not sure the suthor was quite consistant regarding Chico - was he an abusive spouse, or not? Overall, worth the time and I would recommend it to someone looking for a quick little entertaining story.
Three and a half stars out of five.