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A Cozy Cash Mystery #2
Lip Glock
Product Bestselling Romantic Comedy and Humorous Mystery Author D. D. Scott - both a Kindle Nation Daily and Pixel of Ink Bargain Book Pick – is gettin’ “cozy” with all your fave Bootscootin’ Books Characters...as in Comedic Caper cozy...with LIP GLOCK - Book Two of her Cozy Cash Mysteries.Think Will and Kate gone Bond, James Bond...and the blue-hair version of Charlie's Angels too...under the Tuscan sunBuckle your seatbelts! Cozy Cash Mystery, Super-Hot, International Crime-Fighting Couple Roman Bellesconi and Zoey Witherspoon - now very Will and Kate gone Bond, James Bond - once again team-up with The Bootscootin' Books' Mom Squad, now the blue-hair version of Charlie's Angels, to recover billions of bunches of hedge fund cozy-cash...but this time, all under the Tuscan sun.It's a super-sonic speed, action-packin' thrill-ride, full of pot-bellied pigs, hydrofoils, and gelato! Book Stylist to The Stars Zoey Witherspoon has stepped it up a bit and is now a Bond Girl-in-the-making. But on her way to establish a Milan office for her international celebrity clientele, she ends up at the wrong end of a Glock. And this isn’t just any Glock. It’s one held to her chest by her future Granny-in-law who also happens to have some big-time Italian Mob issues. Prince Roman Bellesconi of Italy’s Royal House of Savoy may have brought down Ponzi-scheming King Bernard McCall, but Bernie’s vast hedge-fund fraud rings are still going strong and threaten to ruin Roman’s family’s monarchy. If Roman and Zoey, along with the help of The Mom Squad and a pot-bellied pig, can’t figure out where all the cozy cash is hidden, Roman’s family may not live long enough to save their monarchy’s reign.About the D. Scott is a Bestselling Romantic Comedy and Humorous Mystery Author and a Writer’s Go-To-Gal for Muse Therapy, plus the #1 Amazon Bestselling Author of MUSE UNLEASHING YOUR INNER SYBIL and the co-founder of The Writer’s Guide to E-Publishing, your destination site for Everything E-Publishing. Her bestselling romantic comedies and humorous mysteries are all about sexy, sassy, smart, career-driven women and the men who complete them. They're a bit chick lit with a gone-country twist...and now a humorous mystery, comedic caper twist too. For her Bootscootin’ Books Series...think Sex and The City meets Urban Cowboy. Now, with her Cozy Cash Mysteries...think Bond, James Bond added to the mix. Praise for THUG GUARD – Book One of The Cozy Cash “Who Needs Bourne When You’ve Got Zoey Witherspoon...This is one fast and furious, funny as H-E-Double Hockeysticks caper story, and I literally found my abs aching from laughter by the end of the first chapter. D.D. Scott is already a master at wise-cracking characters and action that moves as fast as any Ludlum flick. In fact, think of Zoey Witherspoon as Jason Bourne – with a good set of French tips and a designer holster for her Glock." - Jeff Lee, Author of The Ladies Temperance Club's Farewell Tour“As soon as I read her first book, “Bootscootin’ Blahniks,” I put all her books on my Kindle. They have it all…romance, high fashion, adorable animals, feisty women, gorgeous guys, quirky characters, good food, great dancing…The ultimate escape without spending a fortune on a vacation.” --- Pj Schott“Packed with Punch...D.D.
- GenresMystery
164 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 14, 2011
8 people are currently reading
82 people want to read
About the author
D.D. Scott
40 books86 followers"...one of the top Romantic Comedy/Humorous Mystery writers out right now." — ENT (Ereader News Today)
D. D. Scott is an International Bestselling Author and an Amazon and Barnes & Noble Top 100 Bestselling Author. With over 300,000 books sold, including 30 titles in 5 genres and chart-topping audio books, too, she treats her readers to stories with loads of laughs and a bunch of heart. You can get the scoop on her, her books and her adventures as a new, vegetarian (almost vegan) yogi in her new cyber home — www.ddscottville.com
D. D. Scott is an International Bestselling Author and an Amazon and Barnes & Noble Top 100 Bestselling Author. With over 300,000 books sold, including 30 titles in 5 genres and chart-topping audio books, too, she treats her readers to stories with loads of laughs and a bunch of heart. You can get the scoop on her, her books and her adventures as a new, vegetarian (almost vegan) yogi in her new cyber home — www.ddscottville.com
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 10, 2016
~~From Red Adept Reviews~~
I purchased Lip Glock (The Cozy Cash Mysteries), by D.D. Scott, from Amazon.com.
Overall: 1 1/4 Stars
Plot/Storyline: 1 Star
This isn’t the sort of book that relies on plot to carry it. What plot there is took several chapters to emerge, and when it did, it was gossamer-thin and hard to follow, often obscured by heavy description and aw-shucks first-person exclamations.
The blurb makes mention of Zoey being on her way to establish a Milan office, but that never comes up in the novel. She arrives in Milan, but not for that reason. The first couple of chapters were confusing because so much of the text was Zoey’s exclamatory thought processes rather than actual events. I never did nail down why the monarchy was in trouble, nor how Zoey’s participation was going to save it.
Characters waltzed trippingly from one exotic location to another like they were on the Travel Channel, which kept the pace fast, but once they arrived at most locations, food and physical appearances and snarky, amusing comments filled the pages rather than details that furthered the plot. A notable exception was the sweatshop in Secondigliano, in Naples, where I was sobered by a few paragraphs that dealt with the plight of the poor pressed into service by the Mob. Other serious plot-related moments were too few and far between for me to retain much information.
The worst plot hole I found involved an overly-complicated fake-out and a cryptic clue that needn’t’ve been given at all. One critical plot point assumed the bad guys just threw their old laptops in their home trash.
Lip Glock is book 2 in the Cozy Cash Mysteries series. I haven’t read book one, but this book makes several references to its plot and escapades (though in a stilted, repetitive manner), so I didn’t feel I was missing much. The end was the best part; I felt it set up the next book brilliantly.
Character Development: 2 Stars
Zoey’s fashion background added a firm sense of knowledge to her info base (except regarding Botox—she made a whole set of jokes and nicknames based on Botox for Granny V.’s plumped lips, but Botox is not a filler). But her problem-solving skills were mediocre, she couldn’t shoot a gun well, and her idea of what made a convincing escape costume was naïve, so her P.I. skill set felt lacking. Her emotional range was minimal, making her seem wooden or sociopathic during dramatic moments.
Roman (yes, a Roman named Roman) plays the role of bipolar eye candy. He gets to be condescending once.
The other characters played relatively small roles and as such had little time to showcase themselves; they were consistent but tended toward flat. The Mom Squad was memorable despite their short visit. Every scene with Vinnie the pig was adorable. Veruschka, a.k.a. Granny V., was a hoot. The author left off the period after the V, so I kept reading her name as Granny the Fifth.
Writing Style: 1 Star
OMG! It’s the romantic-caper-esque, Tuscan-sun-worthy, ain’t-that-a-kick-in-the-head version of Twilight!
(I had to. It’s the only way to purge the book’s hypno-hyphenation from my mind.)
Description of Roman’s physical features is regular and repetitive (that darker-than-dark curl of hair, those Tuscan sun-kissed hands), hence the Twilight reference above. See also: writing about a conversation instead of actiony things that are happening at the same time, like a dramatic rescue from a fiery death.
Zoey’s first-person voice is entertaining, with her splashy descriptions and numerous snarky asides, but with her strong personality in every sentence, the story reads like a QVC hostess on too much caffeine.
Sentence structure is often long and convoluted. Aggressive paragraphing is used to draw out the physical length of Zoey’s thoughts on the page, as if a bigger % of the page = a more weighty thought. Dialogue is weak and unremarkable. Word usage is stilted and repetitive, like the author is angling for search engine optimization. She works the series title in several times, but it never really seems to blend. Other favorites are “gorgeous”, “dark”, “very”, and “Tuscan sun”—though the characters never enter Tuscany—and such hyphenated segments as “-quaint”, “-esque”, “-worthy”, and “ultra-”. Words like “oh” and “way” are drawn out to half a dozen letters or more for cheap effect; the author uses both “waaay” and “wayyy”.
The author employs hundreds of hyphenated words and phrases as descriptive elements, often with two or more sets in a row. At first, it’s splashy and amusing, lifting the mood to reflect gaily dashing about amidst devil-may-care hijinks, but it began to wear on me after a few chapters.
Another element of style that the author overuses is the ellipsis. Ellipses were used with such gay abandon that they seemed to be a cover for the author not knowing what sort of punctuation she should actually be using.
Chapter one alone contains misunderstandings regarding what an M.O. and the fetal position are. At one point, the author has a character info-dump directly from the SEC’s website regarding the definition of insider trading (I checked), and has another admit the source. Maybe paraphrasing is too hard?
I see what the author is aiming for, with the witty hyphenations and the OMG!s. I’ve read some truly awesome cozy caper novels with brazen heroines who keep me in stitches, but this is not one of them. What she has here is not a writing style. It’s a complete misconception of the rules of the English language and what constitutes a well-written book.
Editing: 1 Star
Two out of three hyphens in this book are misplaced, beginning with one in the very first sentence. Nearly every verb that’s followed by a two-letter word is hyphenated. Worse, I found plenty of single words that should have been hyphenated together, and would have accentuated the showy writing style.
Many of the commas in the book had apparently become dazed and frightened by the fireworks explosions of hyphens all around them and had herded together in sentences where they didn’t belong.
The author took pleasure in capitalizing numerous terms for people as if they were their titles (Stylishly Dressed Soldier Three). They were funny and added to the book’s tone, but many of them were surrounded by grammar that prevented the term from deserving capitalization (a duke vs. the Duke of Savoy). A particular problem was capitalizing “The” and “My” at the beginning of titles in the middle of a sentence.
The above issues are the most prevalent ones, but there were dozens of minor issues as well. Misused apostrophes (noggin’, ‘ole), mistaking “ravished” for “famished”, etc. (The line read, “I was thirsty and beyond ravished.”) This book needs a competent editor immediately; it currently reads like a rough draft, and those aren’t meant for the public eye.
I purchased Lip Glock (The Cozy Cash Mysteries), by D.D. Scott, from Amazon.com.
Overall: 1 1/4 Stars
Plot/Storyline: 1 Star
This isn’t the sort of book that relies on plot to carry it. What plot there is took several chapters to emerge, and when it did, it was gossamer-thin and hard to follow, often obscured by heavy description and aw-shucks first-person exclamations.
The blurb makes mention of Zoey being on her way to establish a Milan office, but that never comes up in the novel. She arrives in Milan, but not for that reason. The first couple of chapters were confusing because so much of the text was Zoey’s exclamatory thought processes rather than actual events. I never did nail down why the monarchy was in trouble, nor how Zoey’s participation was going to save it.
Characters waltzed trippingly from one exotic location to another like they were on the Travel Channel, which kept the pace fast, but once they arrived at most locations, food and physical appearances and snarky, amusing comments filled the pages rather than details that furthered the plot. A notable exception was the sweatshop in Secondigliano, in Naples, where I was sobered by a few paragraphs that dealt with the plight of the poor pressed into service by the Mob. Other serious plot-related moments were too few and far between for me to retain much information.
The worst plot hole I found involved an overly-complicated fake-out and a cryptic clue that needn’t’ve been given at all. One critical plot point assumed the bad guys just threw their old laptops in their home trash.
Lip Glock is book 2 in the Cozy Cash Mysteries series. I haven’t read book one, but this book makes several references to its plot and escapades (though in a stilted, repetitive manner), so I didn’t feel I was missing much. The end was the best part; I felt it set up the next book brilliantly.
Character Development: 2 Stars
Zoey’s fashion background added a firm sense of knowledge to her info base (except regarding Botox—she made a whole set of jokes and nicknames based on Botox for Granny V.’s plumped lips, but Botox is not a filler). But her problem-solving skills were mediocre, she couldn’t shoot a gun well, and her idea of what made a convincing escape costume was naïve, so her P.I. skill set felt lacking. Her emotional range was minimal, making her seem wooden or sociopathic during dramatic moments.
Roman (yes, a Roman named Roman) plays the role of bipolar eye candy. He gets to be condescending once.
The other characters played relatively small roles and as such had little time to showcase themselves; they were consistent but tended toward flat. The Mom Squad was memorable despite their short visit. Every scene with Vinnie the pig was adorable. Veruschka, a.k.a. Granny V., was a hoot. The author left off the period after the V, so I kept reading her name as Granny the Fifth.
Writing Style: 1 Star
OMG! It’s the romantic-caper-esque, Tuscan-sun-worthy, ain’t-that-a-kick-in-the-head version of Twilight!
(I had to. It’s the only way to purge the book’s hypno-hyphenation from my mind.)
Description of Roman’s physical features is regular and repetitive (that darker-than-dark curl of hair, those Tuscan sun-kissed hands), hence the Twilight reference above. See also: writing about a conversation instead of actiony things that are happening at the same time, like a dramatic rescue from a fiery death.
Zoey’s first-person voice is entertaining, with her splashy descriptions and numerous snarky asides, but with her strong personality in every sentence, the story reads like a QVC hostess on too much caffeine.
Sentence structure is often long and convoluted. Aggressive paragraphing is used to draw out the physical length of Zoey’s thoughts on the page, as if a bigger % of the page = a more weighty thought. Dialogue is weak and unremarkable. Word usage is stilted and repetitive, like the author is angling for search engine optimization. She works the series title in several times, but it never really seems to blend. Other favorites are “gorgeous”, “dark”, “very”, and “Tuscan sun”—though the characters never enter Tuscany—and such hyphenated segments as “-quaint”, “-esque”, “-worthy”, and “ultra-”. Words like “oh” and “way” are drawn out to half a dozen letters or more for cheap effect; the author uses both “waaay” and “wayyy”.
The author employs hundreds of hyphenated words and phrases as descriptive elements, often with two or more sets in a row. At first, it’s splashy and amusing, lifting the mood to reflect gaily dashing about amidst devil-may-care hijinks, but it began to wear on me after a few chapters.
Another element of style that the author overuses is the ellipsis. Ellipses were used with such gay abandon that they seemed to be a cover for the author not knowing what sort of punctuation she should actually be using.
Chapter one alone contains misunderstandings regarding what an M.O. and the fetal position are. At one point, the author has a character info-dump directly from the SEC’s website regarding the definition of insider trading (I checked), and has another admit the source. Maybe paraphrasing is too hard?
I see what the author is aiming for, with the witty hyphenations and the OMG!s. I’ve read some truly awesome cozy caper novels with brazen heroines who keep me in stitches, but this is not one of them. What she has here is not a writing style. It’s a complete misconception of the rules of the English language and what constitutes a well-written book.
Editing: 1 Star
Two out of three hyphens in this book are misplaced, beginning with one in the very first sentence. Nearly every verb that’s followed by a two-letter word is hyphenated. Worse, I found plenty of single words that should have been hyphenated together, and would have accentuated the showy writing style.
Many of the commas in the book had apparently become dazed and frightened by the fireworks explosions of hyphens all around them and had herded together in sentences where they didn’t belong.
The author took pleasure in capitalizing numerous terms for people as if they were their titles (Stylishly Dressed Soldier Three). They were funny and added to the book’s tone, but many of them were surrounded by grammar that prevented the term from deserving capitalization (a duke vs. the Duke of Savoy). A particular problem was capitalizing “The” and “My” at the beginning of titles in the middle of a sentence.
The above issues are the most prevalent ones, but there were dozens of minor issues as well. Misused apostrophes (noggin’, ‘ole), mistaking “ravished” for “famished”, etc. (The line read, “I was thirsty and beyond ravished.”) This book needs a competent editor immediately; it currently reads like a rough draft, and those aren’t meant for the public eye.
October 22, 2012
As the continuation of Thug Guard, I liked this book. It was full of fun, engaging characters and lots of action that made this a quick read. I was disappointed that the relationship between Zoey and Roman; I don't understand why Scott didn't just develop their relationship in this story from the fake marriage to a true love story. The romance element of her other books was really missing in this one for me. I also felt like this story should have just been combined with Thug Guard rather than being two separate books. This one just didn't feel complete; Scott wraps up this book in a detached manner, IMO, especially with all of the action in the rest of the story. It was anticlimactic.
February 4, 2012
Another enjoyable read in this series. Can't wait to get the quick short reads she has about the Mom Squad. They're an enjoyable group of seniors getting into more trouble.
May 1, 2012
I had hard time following the plot. The book still needs some work done of it.
June 8, 2012
Horrid! How someone who uses so many clichés can get a novel published it beyond me. Must be nepotism.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews