Better Homes and Corpses (Hamptons Home & Garden Mysteries #1) By: Kathleen Bridge

Plot:

After Meg Barrett found her fiancé still had designs on his ex-wife, she decided it was time to refurbish her life. Leaving her glamorous job at a top home and garden magazine, she fled Manhattan for Montauk, only to find decorating can sometimes lead to detecting…

In between scouring estate sales for her new interior design business, Cottages by the Sea, Meg visits the swanky East Hampton home of her old college roommate, Jillian Spenser. But instead of seeing how the other half lives—she learns how the other half dies. Jillian’s mother, known as the Queen Mother of the Hamptons, has been murdered. Someone has staged a coup.

When she helps a friend inventory the Spensers’ estate for the insurance company, Meg finds herself right in the thick of things. Cataloging valuable antiques and art loses its charm when Meg discovers that the Spenser family has been hiding dangerous secrets, which may have furnished a murderer with a motive. As Meg gets closer to the truth, the killer will do anything to paint her out of the picture…
Review:

I didn’t read the whole of Better Homes and Corpses, I got to sixty percent and then skipped to the last few chapters. It just was not my preferred cozy mystery. It had everything there, for the most part, I could have done with more character development of the male characters and less antiquing stuff, but it had everything else. I think that’s honestly why I didn’t like it as much, Meg’s career was just not something I have more than a passing interest in so all the little info dumps about antiques and refurbishing stuff was just boring.

Meg was an alright protagonist, she wasn’t too perfect, and she was interesting enough. There were editing issues, though. Too often I had no idea who was talking in the large cast of characters. The men all sounded the same and the other women in the story were all a bit off. One minute Meg was internally complaining about how sheltered and “introverted”(the author used introverted as basically a synonym for shy which bugs me a lot)  Jillian was and the next she was ordering for her like she was a child. Meg would also just randomly show up places with absolutely no indication to the reader except vague suggestions that you were just supposed to understand.

I’m not going to rate this book, even though I read about 75%, maybe someone else with different hobbies would enjoy this more. For me, I’m going to pass on the series.