REVIEW: Frictional Characters

 Frictional Characters
Author: Elizabeth Spann Craig

I had to chuckle a bit while reading Frictional Characters. The Village Library series is set in a small NC town. I grew up in several small towns in the Midwest and then lived 20 years in another small town in NC. The  depiction of Whitby, NC reminds me so much of things I experienced living in tiny towns. 

In a small town, if residents don't know you personally, they know "of you." Gossip flies through town at the speed of sound. Everyone knows everybody's business, or thinks they do. And every neighborhood has That Neighbor -- the one who doesn't mow their lawn or keep their property clean or has a tendency to be a troublemaker. Every neighborhood also has the person (or persons) who believe they are the resident Yard Police. Who needs an HOA when you have Nosy Nellie walking around?

Plus, small towns are NOT like Mayberry. They seem idyllic at first.....but there are hidden dark secrets. Every little town I lived in had nasty little things going on behind the scenes. Jealousies, lies, whispers about infidelities, crooked business deals, suspicious deaths, good old boy politics.....even cults (two small towns I lived in had religious extremist cults that caused problems. How I managed to hit that particular jackpot twice is a mystery....ugh!

The plot in Frictional Characters really hit home with me when The Problem Guy in Librarian Ann Beckett's neighborhood turns up dead. Family squabbles, neighbor squabbles, business squabbles, relationship squabbles. Nearly everyone in town had some sort of grief with the guy. Librarian Ann Beckett finds herself sifting through the list of people with grievances with the deceased. It's difficult to find the person angry enough to kill someone when that person has made almost everyone in town upset. Frictional Characters is a perfect title for this book! 

The plot definitely kept me engaged the entire time. The investigation moved along at a nice pace and there were plenty of suspects and twists. I definitely enjoyed the story.

After reading several of these books in a row, I am starting to see the author's formula for her books. Murder.....preliminary investigation and basic suspects.....follow up additional murder discovered.....more investigation....twist and reveal....wrap up/end. Each book is pretty much following this basic outline....with a bit of character development, humor and fluff thrown in. I'm enjoying the stories, but hoping that later books in the series deviate from this basic outline. At least in this one, a different person found the dead body. I swear if Librarian Ann Beckett finds one more dead body the state police are going to lock her up just on principle. :)

 This book also had several typos and errors that weren't caught in editing. Most of the errors weren't glaring but there were multiple mistakes. At one point a character had gone home from the library, but at the beginning of the next chapter she was still in the library, even though another character stated previously she had just driven her back home. A bit later in the book two sentences in a row said basically the same thing, with only small changes. It was as if during rewrites the author had replaced that sentence but the original version remained as well. As a former news editor, those type of errors pull me right out of the story. Continuity errors like that should have been caught in editing! Perhaps in later editions this has been corrected.  

Enjoyable read! I'm continuing with this series as I like the characters and the plots make for an entertaining, quick read. But I do hope the next book varies the basic plot outline a bit. It's getting a bit predictable with each book being just a variation on the same basic formula. 

On to the next book in this series!