West of Death

by Catherine Gottfred, B.T. Gottfred

“Ms. West, are you confessing you had more than one motive to kill Ms. Diaz?”

I wasn’t very good at this. Jotted down my first notes on the yellow notepad. About Elizabeth. About Detective Blue’s mustache. Then drew flowers with big petals. I like drawing flowers. Though I was about as good at drawing flowers as I was at feigning innocence.

“Ms. West, what are you writing down?”

“You can call me Athena.” (Was I flirting with him? I was. I’m the type of person that believes you can meet your soul mate at anytime, anywhere. Why eliminate the possibility of true love just because the circumstances were not ideal or the timing was bad?)



“Ms. West.”

(The timing of meeting Detective Blue definitely wasn’t great… and the circumstances probably couldn’t be worse.)

“Did you kill Elizabeth Diaz?”

“I mean… sorta?”

Genres: Mystery

258 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 24, 2024

Reviews

[literary_larissa · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5 ⭐️
I did not enjoy this book at all. The main character was insufferable and the writing read like a text message. This is not a book I would suggest to others to read.

[averypaletree · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book tries really hard to be "quippy" and "modern" but it falls flat. The characters are inconsistent and boring. The main character is annoyingly obsessed with every man she lays eyes on. Her constant self depreciating comments about her weight were unnecessary and made the book worse. 1/5 would not recommend.

[Kara Anderson · Rating 1 out of 5]

I won a free copy of this e-book through a Goodreads giveaway in exchange for my honest review.

Honest being the operative word here...
So, being completely honest... I despised this book and everything about it.

The FMC...is the most infuriatingly, dislikeable, intolerable character I have ever experienced!

This was more like the jumbled, raving thoughts of a sex-deprived, extremely immature, obnoxious teenager girl than the grown woman it was supposed to be.

This entire book was poorly written, with so many incomplete sentences, and this author apparently has a strong dislike for personal pronouns!


There was no character development whatsoever - in fact every single character was very much intolerable..

There was not a single thing I like about this book. The comments the FMC made about her own writing are 100% true for this authors writing as well.

Honestly, if I could give this Zero stars, I absolutely would.

[Lisa Ahlstedt · Rating 1 out of 5]

Athena West (or Atheeeeena if you're a male character flirting with her in the story, which they all do) is called out to California by her former best friend, Elizabeth. She hasn't spoken to her in the 16 years since they graduated from high school. Elizabeth also stole her boyfriend, Travis, but that wasn't the worst thing she did. Athena and Travis had been working on a book together. Athena planned to be a writer and didn't feel this particular book was anything special. So when she was offered a small sum of money to sign away her rights to the book, she agreed. Soon afterwards, the book became a massive hit and was even turned into a TV series. With the money they made from the success of the book, Elizabeth and Travis bought a resort. The resort is now in severe financial trouble and so they have called on Athena to come and help them. Even though they treated her terribly, Athena has nothing else going on in her life so she agrees to come to California and see what's going on. Soon afterwards there is a murder, so the book begins with Athena being questioned (if you can call the flippant series of one-liners that passes for an interview being questioned) by a handsome detective about the crime. The reader will soon learn Athena finds all men attractive and soon sleeps with all of them (despite most of the men calling her plain, or old, or some other derogatory term).

The book is very choppy while Athena seems to think she's so clever and irresistible. It's all sorta tiring. Sorta unbelievable. Sorta annoying. And oh yeah, the word "sorta" is used at least once and sometimes twice on every page (or so it sorta seems). The story is a quick read and the "big reveal" at the end is believable enough. It's just a sorta long slog to get there.

I received a copy of this book from a GoodReads giveaway.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fun and interesting read! I was captivated with the voice of this FMC. She is not traditional and we are reading her words, not narrated by an unknown force. This novel reads like a conversation with someone remembering a tale.

The mystery of it all was jammed backed into the 170 Kindle pages. It was well thought out and organized chaos.

I can not wait to see what Detective West (and maybe Blue?) get up to next!

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I won this book through Goodreads giveaways in exchange for a review. 3.5-4 stars. I thought this was nice change in cozy mystery reads. Is it perfect? No. But it’s a great 3 hour quick read. I liked the type of humor and storytelling aspect the MC gave. I’d be down to read more from this series.

[Amanda Murazzi · Rating 3 out of 5]

All together, it’s a good story. Lots of typos. Quick read.

[Tanya T. · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book but I didn’t enjoy the writing style, especially during the interviews.