Death Goes Shopping

Death Goes Shopping, subtitled A Jessica Turnbull Mystery, is the first novel by Jessica Burton. The title character is Promotions Director for a shopping mall, and just as she's putting the finishing touches on Halloween and planning for Christmas, three people are shot dead in the mall's food court. Now, normally in mystery novels the main character is involved in the mystery--you know, stumbling upon clues, bumping into suspects, solving the whodunnit. In this book, however, the author's taken a really weird move: the mystery is completely in the background. Instead, the foreground is all about Jessica Turnbull and her (to my mind) rather boring life as a mall employee, her difficulty in finding someone to play Santa, her quest to find the right color wool for her knitting, etc. That idea might work if Turnbull was a really unusual, quirky, funny, or tragic character so that her day-to-day life was enough to carry the story, but instead the book simply reads like the really boring diary of a not-particularly-interesting person.