Antiques Roadkill by Barbara Allan, a review

The book: Entertaining and fairly light reading for a murder mystery

The author: Snarky as all get-out, much to my immense delight, and worth reading again. (The "author" is actually two authors, Barbara Collins and Max Allan Collins, who use the joint pseudonym.)

Review:

A few weeks ago on our family vacation, I found myself at the whim of my husband, who had located and claimed the television remote at our hotel. For some odd reason, he had us watching some sort of show where people bid on storage units in the hopes they would find some great item or items they could later sell for profit. Antiques were a huge find. I'll take their word for it. Most of the items showed looked like trash to me.

When I stopped into the library not long after that, I found Antiques Roadkill on the mystery shelves, and figured it would be an interesting tie-in to that neverending chain of storage unit auctions show.

The story was straightforward enough. Brandy Borne was forced to move back in with her mother after a divorce. Her mother's mental issues aside, Brandy was not exactly the most stable individual herself. Brandy's much-older sister Peggy Sue appeared to have been tainted as well, although in different ways. Upon returning home, Brandy discovered Clint Carson, who dealt in antiques, had conned her mother out of most of her childhood memories, in the form of her mother's furniture and knick-knacks. When he turned up dead, Brandy and her mother were immediate suspects. The rest of the story wove back and forth between other individuals who had similarly been swindled, the social-climbers that surrounded Peggy Sue's life, and the random victims of their mother's mental illness and/or flair for the dramatic. (Those last two were sometimes, but not always, connected.)

Each chapter ended with "A Trash 'n' Treasures Tip." Most of them were tidbits I already knew, although the addition of character development through such those tips was something I found amusing.

The individuals throughout the book were more caricatures than characters, but that honestly made them more bearable. Every child out there has probably been embarrassed by his or her parent at one point or another, and the over-the-top theatrics turned the story into less of an embarrassment and more of a circus created strictly for the reader's entertainment. Brandy's snarky asides made me chuckle a number of times. Her frequent shout-outs to her need for, and love of, Prozac made me wonder whether it would actually help people feel more comfortable with requesting it should they need it themselves. (As a big supporter of medicines such as Prozac, and my personal go-to depression drug Zoloft, I think we need to get rid of the stigma attached to depression and other mental issues so people get the help they need without feeling worse about themselves. I'm still not sure if I think the jokes about being off one's medication would help or hurt that cause when the character is so over-the-top even without mental illness.) The story and characters were not believable, in my opinion, but they were entertaining.

All in all, Antiques Roadkill was a good, light read, and worth the couple of hours it took for me to get through it. I plan on seeking out other works from this collaborative duo, if mostly just to see if the characterization is always this exaggerated and entertaining.