Second book by Dorothy and from what I can tell, the pattern is set.

First, the husband. He's irrevocably weak and pathetic in some dramatic over the top way. This time, instead of the rich boy Prince, the guy in this is really a gutter rat pretending to be the Prince. Instead of simply being gullible and naive in a stupid but meant-to-be endearing way, Scott turns out to be an alley rapist.

Now, there's a story to be written about the decent woman married to the rapist, but it's hard to take it seriously when the wife is ready to burn him at the stake on the discovery of the guy's porn stash. There's a big long injection on the brutalising and dehumanising of all the young innocent girls of the world... What? Halfway through the soapboxing, I was asking myself, what is this woman going on about? Is the husband producing snuff porn or is she upset that she lives in a world where pornographic materials exist and is probably the most popular thing on the Internet? Of course, because everyone knows that this is how it works, from looking at a porn video from time to time, the husband gets addicted to "rape porn" and then becomes a real life rapist. Yes. He's also a cheating womaniser, just so you don't get confused about the level of sleaziness he's at.

Dorothy does not approve of men who patronise prostitutes or view porn material. I doubt there's a throng of people out there going "Yay hookers! Yay porn! Let's take out a full page endorsement in the papers!" But there's a big gap between disapproving of a thing and making an anvilicious declaration of denouncement over the entirety of your novel.

Porn will turn you into a rapist. Yes. Message received.

Second Problem. I don't know how or why, but the introduction of characters in the second act is grating. Mirabelle and Fleur. If you wanted to write a story about a runaway mum and her daughter, then do that from the get go. Misleading blurbs can get super annoying to even the most casual I Idont give a shit reader, I'm almost sure of that, that the percentage of people who like buying one thing and reading a whole other thing is fairly low. I do not like it at all. If i wanted to read about a wife and mother turned lesbian turned murder victim in a whodunit, I would have asked for that. Its completely irrelevant whether or not the whodunit is a better read than the melodrama of a to be divorced housewife, but that'swhat i had planned to read so deliver.

And what happened to Scott? Scott started off as a character and then got turned into a grabby molester. The novel could have used a POV from him. Instead, there's a whole heap of Fleur who contributes absolutely nothing to the main plot aside from helping to flesh out Mirabelle a bit, and really, who the fuck cares.

Tami and Mirabelle are two snowflake characters. The only people who disagree with them turn out to be rapists, murderers, or just all-round crazy and delusional rabbit-boilers. Beatrix gets cancer as divine punishment for man-stealing, but she repents and by touching the Tami's hem, she is healed. Scott also repents and puts himself in penitence just for the record.

Mirabelle's ex husband and father of Fleur... is the only one I guess, to simply be like "Bitch, please. Snowflake or not, fuck you." But then the daughter is enraged by this and he is in turned punished when the daughter replaces Mirabelle's Snowflake with the even superior Tami Snowflake. He did not count on Fleur getting swept up in the orbit of of a whole new snowflake...

All in all, the main problem I think is with the premise. The decisions that came before the actual plotting, things the author failed to consider. Like:

- Should I develop Scott as a real character or make him a dastardly and cartoonishly sinister rapist?
- Continue with the rape drama or escalate to murder drama
- Bring in Fleur in the second act when everyone is already invested in Scott and Tami.
- Make Mirabelle into a snowflake character to help the audience empathise with how bad her murder is
- Have a first person POV from Beatrix despite the fact that withholding the information that she is the one having an affair with Scott would be extremely gimmicky and unnatural

In the end, the whole thing had absolutely nothing to do with Tami and Scott. They're both pretty much bystanders in a murder "mystery" that no one really cares enough about to even deem it a mystery. In other news, some random woman was murdered. She had a daughter and a painting. Reports say she was the most beautiful woman a lot of people had ever seen. She was really raped, but her would-be rapist didn't give enough of a fuck to kill her. Leading suspect - someone who gave a fuck.

That line of suspense doesn't really generate a heap of interest. The shades guy in the series has an alibi. He can't get away from rape porn long enough to plan and carry out a homicide. The only other two people who cared were Fleur and Tami. The ex-husband and Bea weren't anywhere on that radar because they're like "Who?" Fleur was too estranged, and Tami is too snowflakey a character to ever be capable of murder. This is Sandra Dee, not Rizzo. By the time the reveal roled around, I was like "Wait, this is a thing I was supposed to be actively caring about? It matters?"

Tami figures it and the villain does the requisite monologue and it ends more or less. No agency. No urgency. Even with the murder solved, there's a big "And?" that follows that goes unanswered. All the characters become less and less important as the story goes on.

Wow. It gets two stars because somewhere very early in the story, there'd been potential.