The Empanada Affair [Kindle Edition]

THE EMPANADA AFFAIR reads to me as if the authors had collected a lot of tourist brochures, visited many tourist sites, and eaten at many restaurants during their stay in Salta (see notes about the authors below) and decided to write a tourist handbook for US visitors. It is filled with the sort of detail you would expect to find in a Frommer's Guide for tourists. When that didn't quite work out they decided to add a mystery element. Unfortunately liking to read crime fiction doesn't always endow the ability to write a good crime fiction novel.

My estimate is that the murder mystery thread in THE EMPANADA AFFAIR occupies about 10% of the novel. The rest is filled with extraneous and largely irrelevant travelogue details. If you had a mind to, you could learn quite a lot about the culture and historical background of Argentina, but unfortunately that wasn't my purpose in reading it. I was looking for a good murder mystery plot set against an authentic background. While I got the background, I wasn't prepared for it to take centre stage. In fact the murder mystery theme never does get properly resolved. The suspense element dies out well before the end.

To add to my annoyance PI Roger Bowman, ex LA cop, was a most unprofessional person and the numerous steamy (and graphically described) sex scenes between him and his client Suzanne Foster made me feel like a voyeur.

There are a number of technical difficulties with this novel that the authors must solve before venturing into publishing again. For example most chapters finish with Roger and Suzanne snuggled up in bed at the end of the day. Each chapter seems to deal with a journey or a day.

There is a second problem caused by stilted and poorly constructed dialogue.
I can always tolerate something that looks like the following once, but to ask me to read conversations constructed like this several times is unimaginative.

"What did you like the best?" I asked Suzanne.

"Did you like the chorizo, the beef sausage?"

"I thought it was kind of bland and needed something spicy to go with it. The combination with chimichurri was pretty good. At home I'm used to the Mexican pork chorizo, which is highly spiced, and I like it a lot more."

"How about the blood sausage?"

"I didn't particularly care for it. The flavor is very bland and the texture is off-putting, kind of gritty."

"What did you think about the chinchulines?"

So, if you are not particularly addicted to crime fiction, want to read something that reads like a non-fiction travelogue with virtually no story, and intend to travel to Salta, Argentina, then this may be the book for you.

Me, I took the blurb a little more at face value, and was extremely disappointed.

Erotic Flashes Reviews
Rating: 3 Flashes

Plot in brief: Suzanne Foster hires Private Detective Roger Bowman to invetigate who murdered her father. They travel together to seek the killer and discover they have a lot in common and well as an instantaneous physical attraction.

My review: I have to admit that I wasn't sure I was going to like this story. It's not really my preferred reading sub-genre -- I'd call it a travel romance, with a murder mystery plot thrown in. Having said that, it wasn't a bad read. The story is told from the male perspective in the first person, and I found the authors' use of first person to be good. In my head, I heard the voice of the narrator of the early eighties Police Squad TV series -- a dry, matter-of-fact kind of tone. For me, this added to the overall read, giving it a certain timeless feel -- the book could be set in the seventies or in the here and now.

There is a LOT of detailed information throughout the story about places (the immediate environment the characters are in) and food (the meals they're eating). On the plus side, this made for a very sunny kind of read that kind of reminded me of holidays -- you can literally SEE where they are, the descriptions are so good. On the down side, I'd say this detracts from the murder investigation a little, and it would almost have been best if the main two characters were food connoisseurs who'd found themselves caught up in a murder mystery plot, giving a more firm reason for all the talk of food and travel. The murder mystery plot itself seems secondary to the details of travel and food, and how the two main characters get on day by day, as they investigate who murdered Suzanne's father.

I really liked the two main characters -- they were very real to me and well painted in my mind. There's a romance between them from the word go, starting with a basic lustful attraction and leading to more. I found the main focus of the story to be on how these two relate to each other and get to know each other in various locales, rather than the plot of the murder investigation itself, so in my opinion, this is a "travel romance", not a crime novel / murder mystery (as the blurb suggests it might be).

Overall, the story is well paced and the characterisation good, leading to my unexpected enjoyment of this book.

Note: I received this book free of charge from the author in exchange for an honest review.