Curtains for Romeo by Jessa Archer

Good World but Too Much Backstory

I usually enjoy the amateur sleuth mystery stories by this author. Even though this book is long enough to support a more drawn-out peppering of backstory all throughout, this book suffered from some large info dumps in the first part of the book. Don’t get me wrong; the backstory for this series is actually interesting. The amateur sleuth, Tig (a name I actually found annoying) is a former actress who once played a teenage detective on a TV show in the 1990s. She and her teenage daughter move from the west coast to North Carolina, where the heroine takes a job as a drama professor. Their new life is upended when the former professor turns up dead, making the heroine the number one suspect. Will her skills as a fake detective help her puzzle out the present? I actually thought the book was better written from the middle on, after the backstory had been fully disclosed. I enjoyed the second half of the book more than the first. I did enjoy some characters and the world the author created. I look forward to the next book, hoping that it won’t be drowning at the start with too much history all at once.