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A Talent to Deceive
Money starts mysteriously disappearing from the local Department of Education, and Tamara Montgomery, one of the district accountants, becomes alarmed and notifies the other "Ladies of the Club," Grace, Celina, Lara, and Romy. Their "Book Club" meetings quickly turn from talk of Tess of the d'Urbervilles to talk of embezzlement...and then, murder. When Tamara's fellow employees start turning up dead under mysterious circumstances, the ladies kick their investigation into high gear. Someone needs to figure out who's been taking the money before anyone else gets hurt. That includes the ladies themselves. They may be in over their heads with this investigation. In addition to taking care of their families and working, now they have to navigate treacherous and unfamiliar waters in hopes they all make it out of their amateur sleuthing in one piece.
265 pages, Hardcover
First published October 24, 2007
4 people want to read
About the author
Denisa Nickell Hanania
4 books5 followersMrs. Hanania was raised on the southern edge of Lake Michigan near Indiana’s tranquil sand dunes and hardwood forests. She loves writing, traveling, speaking, and spending time with her family. Her book, The Sharecroppers, was awarded first place for fiction at the 2013 Author Awards.
She believes Stories are a gift. First, they are a gift to the author. Then, the gift is passed on to the readers.
Although industry professionals argue authors should stick with one genre and one target audience, Mrs. Hanania chooses to write the stories that touch her heart. “I don’t look at it from a marketing standpoint. The most important questions to me are: Is this a story worth telling? How will this story benefit the reader?”
Her most recent book is an example. Instead of being limited to a specific age group, The Traveling Cabin was written for multiple generations to enjoy together. Parents, siblings, and grandparents can “meet the same new characters” and share experiences. This creates additional connections between family members and deepens the relationships.
Her most recent book is an example of writing a story for all to enjoy. Instead of being limited to a specific age group, The Traveling Cabin was written for multiple generations to delight in together. Parents, siblings, and grandparents will always remember the shared experience of meeting new characters and reading the drama of an unfolding story. This creates additional connections between family members and deepens their relationships.
Mrs. Hanania also published her first illustrated children’s book, Me & THAT BABY! in 2022. “I didn’t set out to write a children’s book. Two of my grandsons took up position across from each other on either side of my knees jockeying for favor with me. I was shocked.”
Thus, Me & THAT BABY! was born! This darling book is a fun way to acknowledge children’s feelings and reframe their view of any little intruder. The book encourages close relationships with a sibling or cousin and sets the stage for good mental health in a family.
“When I visit preschools to read this book to the children, I start by stating that ‘babies are little lugs. Babies don’t actually do anything, but everybody gets excited when the baby smiles.’ I tell them, ‘I don’t get it ‘cause I’ve been smiling for years, and nobody gets excited.’ The children are immediately engaged. They can relate to those feelings.”
Mrs. Hanania often gets asked if she is a Christian author. “I would say I am a Christian who writes books. Being a word person, it matters to me which is the noun—meaning the essence or core of something and which is the adjective—a partial description of the noun. My core is found in Jesus. Writing is one thing I do along with being a wife, a mother, a grandmother, and a friend. The books I write are not overtly religious, but they come from a deep belief in how much God loves us and wants us to be whole.
She believes Stories are a gift. First, they are a gift to the author. Then, the gift is passed on to the readers.
Although industry professionals argue authors should stick with one genre and one target audience, Mrs. Hanania chooses to write the stories that touch her heart. “I don’t look at it from a marketing standpoint. The most important questions to me are: Is this a story worth telling? How will this story benefit the reader?”
Her most recent book is an example. Instead of being limited to a specific age group, The Traveling Cabin was written for multiple generations to enjoy together. Parents, siblings, and grandparents can “meet the same new characters” and share experiences. This creates additional connections between family members and deepens the relationships.
Her most recent book is an example of writing a story for all to enjoy. Instead of being limited to a specific age group, The Traveling Cabin was written for multiple generations to delight in together. Parents, siblings, and grandparents will always remember the shared experience of meeting new characters and reading the drama of an unfolding story. This creates additional connections between family members and deepens their relationships.
Mrs. Hanania also published her first illustrated children’s book, Me & THAT BABY! in 2022. “I didn’t set out to write a children’s book. Two of my grandsons took up position across from each other on either side of my knees jockeying for favor with me. I was shocked.”
Thus, Me & THAT BABY! was born! This darling book is a fun way to acknowledge children’s feelings and reframe their view of any little intruder. The book encourages close relationships with a sibling or cousin and sets the stage for good mental health in a family.
“When I visit preschools to read this book to the children, I start by stating that ‘babies are little lugs. Babies don’t actually do anything, but everybody gets excited when the baby smiles.’ I tell them, ‘I don’t get it ‘cause I’ve been smiling for years, and nobody gets excited.’ The children are immediately engaged. They can relate to those feelings.”
Mrs. Hanania often gets asked if she is a Christian author. “I would say I am a Christian who writes books. Being a word person, it matters to me which is the noun—meaning the essence or core of something and which is the adjective—a partial description of the noun. My core is found in Jesus. Writing is one thing I do along with being a wife, a mother, a grandmother, and a friend. The books I write are not overtly religious, but they come from a deep belief in how much God loves us and wants us to be whole.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 5, 2015
This may quite possibly be one of the worst books I've ever read in my life, up there with Henry James' excremental masterpiece, The Golden Bowl. However, while James's folly was mostly due to excessive reliance on the dictaphone and can at least be classified as literature, this book cannot even sort of meet that standard. At first glance, it appears to be a mediocre two-star menopausal mystery, but it has trouble living up to even THAT low standard. It takes a sort of talent to write a book this bad. It is not a book that deserves to be read in a traditional sense, because in the traditional sense it is unreadable. This is a book that is truly deserving of study as epitomizing everything that is wrong not only with modern literature but with American suburban culture generally.
To begin with, the prose is crap. If there is an elementary writing error to be made in this book, Hanania makes it tenfold. The most annoying of these by far is her inept and redundant dialogue ("'I believe you could do it', Romy voiced confidence in her friend"), but she commits every other error imaginable as well, including wooden character "development"; referring to every character in every possible way in the same sentence (e.g. "Amy", "Ms. Cole" and "the administrative assistant" are used interchangeably to describe the same person in the course of a single paragraph.); and lesser errors such as assuming that the reader has intimate knowledge of the geography of northern Indianapolis. Worse, the "plot" of this book is so filled with holes and improbable coincidences that it simply doesn't make sense, from the same two detectives on a very large police force appearing over and over as the only law enforcement in the entire book (including "moonlighting for the security company") to the characters' impersonations of various people never coming back to bite them even in scenes where those detectives are present, to an actual incident in which someone is nearly shot in a crowded room and yet nobody hears the gun go off, nobody sees anyone pointing a gun at all, and nobody is actually shot despite the density of the crowd. Some scenes, especially any set in the school superintendent's mansion (because most school superintendents totally have those), require such similarly enormous suspensions of disbelief that they would probably rise to the level of unintentionally comedic if Hanaina's writing weren't so terrible, e.g. a character is explained as knowing how to pick locks because "she grew up in Milwaukee" - she couldn't have at least picked Chicago?
What really makes this book rise from bad to stupefyingly awful, however, is the author's absurd double standard regarding the morality of her characters. As far as vigilantism is concerned, Hanaina is either a sociopath or an oblivious moron, and is very likely both. Her group of vigilante suburban socialite protagonists "inspired by her actual book club" commit any number of state and federal crimes, some of them actually more serious than the problem they are trying to catch. These range from breaking and entering to impersonation, evidence tampering, repeatedly interfering with a police investigation, obstruction of justice, lying to the authorities on multiple occasions, and especially various types of cybercrime, including one character who late in the book starts hacking into various computer systems (Federal crime, minimum 20 years in prison). This same character, at the end of the book, also commits *Federal grand larceny* by "undoing" the theft that started the book by *hacking into a bank and stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from the "bad guy's" bank account* because "it's really our money that he stole and blah blah think of the children". In real life, assuming "Romy" (yes, she named a character Romy) could actually pull off the spectacularly illegal task of hacking into a bank server based on "something she found on the internet", the disappearance of that much money at once would immediately trigger an IP trace, which would have every FBI agent in a six-state radius converging on Geist Reservoir within minutes to take "Romy" away for life and charge the rest of them as accomplices. In the name of being the vigilante justice squad, the protagonists also go the stupidly and implausibly illegal route on more than on other occasion. In one particularly absurd scene, the "bad guy" pawns a computer with incriminating information on it. Rather than turning this over to the police, the characters buy the computer, sneak into the "bad guy's" house, and swap hard drives, then call the police so that the "bad guy" will be caught with the incriminating files. This, of course, is evidence tampering in a way that absolutely guarantees that the "bad guy" will go free once it's discovered....but in Hanaina's world, it's just ordinary housewives serving the cause of justice (because we apparently don't pay the police to do that). The utterly insufferable part of these "bored housewife with six kids serving the 'cause of justice'" fantasies is not just that Hanaina seems to think that breaking laws willy-nilly instead of leaving it to the police is okay if the people involved have good intentions. It's that at the same time, it's also okay for those same flagrantly law-breaking characters to get on their moral high horse about the behavior of people they judge to be deficient in character, including *actually quoting Indiana law at them* This includes not only "the bad guys" but also a particular 19 year old character who everyone else in the book makes a point of saying is an idiot at every opportunity simply because she's young, and happens to be written that way. It is obvious that Hanaina's jaundiced suburban perspective of reality is influenced by altogether too many bad detective shows, Fox News, and Mitch Albom novels, and to think that she really believes even half of the things she has her characters say is truly disquieting, to say the least.
Basically, this book exists at all because a boring woman from Indiana in a book club decided to write a book about boring women from Indiana in a book club who do incredibly implausible and infuriatingly illegal things in the name of solving a (really pretty boring) mystery...while in a book club. This book is so bad that when I worked for an organization in Indiana that provided books to actual Indiana book clubs, none of the book clubs that read this book thought it was good. Memo to Ms. Haniana: if you can't even please your own base, give up now. And with so many more talented writers out there waiting to be discovered in ninth-grade classrooms all over the nation, the fact that Avalon would publish swill like this is disgraceful. Though we can at least be glad that if they continue to invest in writers as truly awful as Haniana, Avalon will be out of business very soon.
As anthropology, this book is fascinating. As a novel, it's a disaster. Only recommended for the truly brave or those who really want a closer look at the pathology of the modern Midwestern suburbanite.
To begin with, the prose is crap. If there is an elementary writing error to be made in this book, Hanania makes it tenfold. The most annoying of these by far is her inept and redundant dialogue ("'I believe you could do it', Romy voiced confidence in her friend"), but she commits every other error imaginable as well, including wooden character "development"; referring to every character in every possible way in the same sentence (e.g. "Amy", "Ms. Cole" and "the administrative assistant" are used interchangeably to describe the same person in the course of a single paragraph.); and lesser errors such as assuming that the reader has intimate knowledge of the geography of northern Indianapolis. Worse, the "plot" of this book is so filled with holes and improbable coincidences that it simply doesn't make sense, from the same two detectives on a very large police force appearing over and over as the only law enforcement in the entire book (including "moonlighting for the security company") to the characters' impersonations of various people never coming back to bite them even in scenes where those detectives are present, to an actual incident in which someone is nearly shot in a crowded room and yet nobody hears the gun go off, nobody sees anyone pointing a gun at all, and nobody is actually shot despite the density of the crowd. Some scenes, especially any set in the school superintendent's mansion (because most school superintendents totally have those), require such similarly enormous suspensions of disbelief that they would probably rise to the level of unintentionally comedic if Hanaina's writing weren't so terrible, e.g. a character is explained as knowing how to pick locks because "she grew up in Milwaukee" - she couldn't have at least picked Chicago?
What really makes this book rise from bad to stupefyingly awful, however, is the author's absurd double standard regarding the morality of her characters. As far as vigilantism is concerned, Hanaina is either a sociopath or an oblivious moron, and is very likely both. Her group of vigilante suburban socialite protagonists "inspired by her actual book club" commit any number of state and federal crimes, some of them actually more serious than the problem they are trying to catch. These range from breaking and entering to impersonation, evidence tampering, repeatedly interfering with a police investigation, obstruction of justice, lying to the authorities on multiple occasions, and especially various types of cybercrime, including one character who late in the book starts hacking into various computer systems (Federal crime, minimum 20 years in prison). This same character, at the end of the book, also commits *Federal grand larceny* by "undoing" the theft that started the book by *hacking into a bank and stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from the "bad guy's" bank account* because "it's really our money that he stole and blah blah think of the children". In real life, assuming "Romy" (yes, she named a character Romy) could actually pull off the spectacularly illegal task of hacking into a bank server based on "something she found on the internet", the disappearance of that much money at once would immediately trigger an IP trace, which would have every FBI agent in a six-state radius converging on Geist Reservoir within minutes to take "Romy" away for life and charge the rest of them as accomplices. In the name of being the vigilante justice squad, the protagonists also go the stupidly and implausibly illegal route on more than on other occasion. In one particularly absurd scene, the "bad guy" pawns a computer with incriminating information on it. Rather than turning this over to the police, the characters buy the computer, sneak into the "bad guy's" house, and swap hard drives, then call the police so that the "bad guy" will be caught with the incriminating files. This, of course, is evidence tampering in a way that absolutely guarantees that the "bad guy" will go free once it's discovered....but in Hanaina's world, it's just ordinary housewives serving the cause of justice (because we apparently don't pay the police to do that). The utterly insufferable part of these "bored housewife with six kids serving the 'cause of justice'" fantasies is not just that Hanaina seems to think that breaking laws willy-nilly instead of leaving it to the police is okay if the people involved have good intentions. It's that at the same time, it's also okay for those same flagrantly law-breaking characters to get on their moral high horse about the behavior of people they judge to be deficient in character, including *actually quoting Indiana law at them* This includes not only "the bad guys" but also a particular 19 year old character who everyone else in the book makes a point of saying is an idiot at every opportunity simply because she's young, and happens to be written that way. It is obvious that Hanaina's jaundiced suburban perspective of reality is influenced by altogether too many bad detective shows, Fox News, and Mitch Albom novels, and to think that she really believes even half of the things she has her characters say is truly disquieting, to say the least.
Basically, this book exists at all because a boring woman from Indiana in a book club decided to write a book about boring women from Indiana in a book club who do incredibly implausible and infuriatingly illegal things in the name of solving a (really pretty boring) mystery...while in a book club. This book is so bad that when I worked for an organization in Indiana that provided books to actual Indiana book clubs, none of the book clubs that read this book thought it was good. Memo to Ms. Haniana: if you can't even please your own base, give up now. And with so many more talented writers out there waiting to be discovered in ninth-grade classrooms all over the nation, the fact that Avalon would publish swill like this is disgraceful. Though we can at least be glad that if they continue to invest in writers as truly awful as Haniana, Avalon will be out of business very soon.
As anthropology, this book is fascinating. As a novel, it's a disaster. Only recommended for the truly brave or those who really want a closer look at the pathology of the modern Midwestern suburbanite.
December 12, 2013
This is a great book. I loved the interplay between the characters. I felt like I was friends with the characters by the end of the book. After one of my friends read this book she said that she actually prolonged finishing the book because she felt like she would be loosing friends when it was over. If you enjoy mysteries that that focus more on the plot than the gore, then this book is for you.
January 8, 2014
I enjoyed the book as much for the mystery as for knowing the setting. Having moved away from Indianapolis several years ago I had fun picturing the many places Denisa described so vividly. In the end I was surprised at the identity of the villain.
September 3, 2012
The book was ok. I didn't really connect with the characters and some of the situations were a bit hard to believe.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews