From Beer to Eternity: 03/16/24

From Beer to Eternity by Sherry Harris and Nancy Wu (Narrator) (2020) is the start of the Sea Glass Saloon mystery series. Chloe Jackson has gone down to the Florida panhandle to help out the grandmother of her dear friend who was killed overseas. Vivi runs the Sea Glass Saloon, far removed from Chloe's work as a librarian. Then things get complicated when she finds a body outside the saloon.

Chloe is a very different from the typical mystery main character. Sure, she does end up inheriting her friend's boat and home but she learns this only after spending about a week sleeping in her car and other unlikely places. Besides not fitting in easily she's also almost completely unskilled in her new job.

My main complaint with this mystery is how much of it hinges on Chloe's naiveté. She's a librarian from Chicago, for goodness sakes, and yet she has these huge gaps in basic colloquial knowledge. For instance, she doesn't grok that "she fixes things" might mean that the woman is a "fixer."

My other complaint is that the climax relies on the murderer getting tired of waiting for Chloe to put all the pieces together. After two weeks of watching Chloe having about as much street sense as a country mouse, the murderer just has to sit pretty. Nothing would happen. The murderer would have gotten away with it.

Despite my two complaints, I love the setting and the support characters. The next book in the series is A Time to Swill (2021).

Four stars

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