Meh. Just meh

The plot was slow and soggy, I was listening for the nostalgia and easy-going murder mystery aspect, but didn’t feel like much of either was present.
No actual murder until chapter 16 end, so… meh.

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Easy listening

Lovely listen in-keeping with the series. Story was weak but forgiveable - characters and Cabot Cove all present.

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MSW fans deserve better. Much better.

I'll come out and say it immediately -- this is utter garbage.

The book lasts for 7.5 hours and it takes MORE THAN FOUR HOURS for the body to appear! This is ridiculous!! More than half of the book is spent on nothing. The book is wall-to-wall filler. Don't expect the remaining 3-and-a-bit hours to be filled with Jessica solving the murder, though. That very much takes a back seat to a tedious story (that goes nowhere, by the way) about the town entering some competition to be crowned the most Christmassy town in Maine (or some such nonsense).

There is VERY little in the way of detecting here. It's all about this stupid competition, people baking cookies, and Jess making cups of tea.

I cannot stress how much filler is in this book. Page after page of nothing. I can only presume that Terrie Farley Moran had a word limit she had to reach.

Any other book:
I got home, turned on my computer, and made myself a cup of tea in my favourite mug.

This book:
As I walked past my computer, I tapped the power button and headed to the kitchen to put the kettle on the stove. I pulled an Irish breakfast teabag from the cannister and set it in my current favourite mug. Grady's son, Frank, had given it to me as a present on my last birthday. It had a gorgeous ocean scene on one side and the words "Rockaway Beach, New York" printed on the other. I smiled at the memories of our last vacation together on a part of the Atlantic ocean four hundred miles or so south of Cabot Cove. When the kettle whistled, I poured the boiling water over the teabag and carried my mug into the dining room and sat it in front of my computer.

Let me repeat, there is very little detecting in this book. Jess is mostly focused on helping someone prepare something for this competition, getting her house ready for Grady and his family coming, or preparing for Thanksgiving. It's only with about an hour and 45 minutes to go that anything starts to really happen, and it's in the last 45 minutes that Jess has her a-ha moment and figures it out.

I've listened to about 30 of these Murder She Wrote books, and the best of them can only be described as adequate. Not a single one truly captures the spirit or atmosphere of the TV show. This is by far -- BY FAR -- the worst of the ones I've listened to. I really couldn't believe that so much time had passed without anything -- ANYTHING -- happening.

And for all that we heard about the preparation for this competition, we heard very little about the actual events that took place.

I'm not a fan of the narrator either. She has done several previous MSW books and I always felt she sounded just too old. She at least tries to differentiate some of the characters, so I'm giving her 2 stars rather than just one. But there are so many better voice actors out there.

Or with the advances in AI technology, why don't they clone Angela Lansbury's voice (and the voices of the other characters) and give us a book that at least sounds authentic? (even if the story itself wouldn't have passed muster as a TV episode)

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