A Bad Day For Sorry

We've got a review for the magazine already so I'm tossing an extra up here on the blog.
It's a great book and so far 6 of our reviewers have read it and loved it.
Jon


A Bad Day For Sorry
Sophie Littlefield
2009
St. Martins

I think that the engine of the story, and the series presumably, is a strong one and definitely an interesting one, but isn’t quite a finely tuned one – though it will serve Littlefield well as a launching pad for future stories. The “correcting” of husbands’ wayward behaviors through force is such a grey area on so many levels, and raises so many questions, that this has a lot of potential to be fertile story ground.

A good bit of crime novels are sexist. There, I said it. There just aren’t a whole hell of a lot of fully developed female characters in relation to the amount of fully developed male characters. This isn’t a condemnation, though, just an observation, because sometimes it’s intentional but often it’s not. More than once while reading A Bad Day For Sorry I had to smile to myself, because at times it’s like a photo negative opposite of the rest of the genre because the two female leads are fully developed but the men are all two-dimensional. They are either enigmas or assholes, with nothing in between.

If, when Stella and Chrissie saddle up to rescue Tucker, A Bad Day For Sorry feels a bit like Thelma & Louise redux, it’s not because it is a rehashing of that movies themes but because, on quite a few levels, it is a direct descendent of it.

Stella is a great character, and future books in the series are going to have a hell of good time fleshing her out further. She has three dimensions and multiple facets. She is contradictory and tenacious. She frustrates. She has firm beliefs that are born from hard experience. She may be an alcoholic. She is a killer. She hasn’t fully confronted her past actions but has loosely reconciled with them. She remains, above all else, interesting.

Did I like the book? Yes, very much so. I found the book to be thought-provoking and engaging. This series and this character have all of the ingredients to be very commercially successful, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t.

Readers who pick this book up (and they should) will be in for a damn good read.

Brian Lindenmuth