This week has been a sad reading week, and I can only guess as to why. On Wednesday I talked about Clive Cussler's The Mediterranean Caper. The only other book I managed to read this week was Shop Till You Drop by Elaine Viets. Here's the blurb from the publisher:

Once on the fast track to success, Helen Hawthorne is now going nowhere fast. She traded in her chic life for a shabby one. And now she's on the run, jumping from city to city and dead-end job to dead-end job, trying to stay one step ahead of her past. After two weeks as the new salesclerk at Juliana's, Fort Lauderdale's ultra-exclusive clothing boutique, Helen still feels out of fashion. And since the only crime likely to be committed around here is being old-or worse, looking old-Helen figures she's safe. Until she discovers the manager has been embezzling money and selling designer drugs along with the designer clothes. Add murder to the mix and Helen's dead-end job is downright deadly.

I picked this up at the bookstore because I had really liked Dying in Style, and wanted to give the author's Dead End Job series a try. While I liked the book, I didn't love it. It took me forever to finish it, and the only thing I can attribute that to was the pacing of the story. To me it seemed to take an inordinately long time for the mystery to start. However, once the author got me fully entrenched in the story the pace picked up quite a bit. Another issue I had with the book relates a lot to the marketing of the book. Everything I've read about it says that it is a humorous mystery. While there are funny parts in the book, it wasn't as funny as I expected a humorous mystery to be. I went ahead and checked out the second book in the series from another library, and I hope to read it next week. I'll let my feelings about that book decide whether or not I want to keep reading the series.

What have you been reading this week?

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