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Wednesday, April 17, 2019

[Mrs. Y Reviews] Death by Diploma” by Kelley Kay Bowles

Book Cover via Amazon.com
Hearken all ye who come before the reviews of  Y and ponder upon her reviewing frame! Today we give shape to a novel of mystery, teaching and the beauty of Iambic Pentameter. Okay, maybe I exaggerated slightly, there is minimal Iambic Pentameter in this book, but it’s still a great book! This has murder, mystery, and awkward teenage boys who have no idea how to talk to girls! Surely you must know more! So gather your chalk, make some fettuccine carbonara and get ready for “Death by Diploma” by Kelley Kay Bowles!

Opinion
Today's review is a request from the author Kelley Kaye. I want to thank Kelley for the copy of the book, and this fantastic story to start on. You can purchase this on Kindle as of posting this review for $8.99.

To start the review, let's start with my first impressions. Now, I had a clue in from Kelley; she said it was a mystery. It is, I got my mystery journal out and was ready to go. I was however surprised and intrigued about how this story unfolded. The initial part of the book entirely was set up to ground the reading in character development and establish the arches. There are loads of clues, to begin with, and I do recommend to my fellow Armature Sleuths to keep track.

Let me go into some critiques. This is a multi-faceted critique under the "Story Structure, Foundation and Presentation" portion of my scoring. I know this was a very well edited and spot edited book, Kelley sent thanks at the end to both wonderful people who helped. They did an outstanding job.  Kelley sent me a mobi copy of the book, and so in my copy, I noticed there were issues with spacing, random enter selections, lines, italics, and margins. To be certain I had the same copy as the Kindle version, I checked the "Look inside!" part of the copy, and it is the same copy.

So this here is the critique. There are no spaces between paragraphs, random italics are used, and spacing issues from hitting enter in specific spots. In this case, it leaves a weird jagged edge going, which on a Justified Aligned copy it looks a bit like broken puzzle pieces. Now that has nothing to do with the line editor the normal editing; it has to do with the conversion from PDF to Kindle most times according to the Indie Authors I've talked to about it. I've given similar critiques, and I've come to find out that even small things on a PDF can ripple into a mobi copy. For myself personally, I found the book was trying to read at times, not because of the content of the words, but because of the layout. Hence my warning to those of you who read with ferocity and have some eyestrain sensitivities.  I’d suggest changing your fonts and spacing on the Kindle to accommodate. Maybe go with the sepia colored background, possibly even the green color to cut down on the eye-bend. For the record, I usually never do that, I want to read the book on default settings, but I ended up customizing it at 65% so that I could finish reading.

That said, let me move into the excellent things I love about "Death by Diploma."

Firstly, this one was written for all the teachers. From the great ones to the offensive ones, every sort of teacher arch-type is presented. And I don't mean that from just a student or even a parent's perspective. I can tell every teacher in America could relate to the entire story in some way or another.

Net, let's talk about the Willy Shakes! I love Shakespeare, and this book uses him often, and well. From the beautiful little quotations to the choice of adding his works in things, the book has bits of Shakespearian nerd goodness all over it.

Second, I'd like to give a thank you to everyone who worked on polishing the book as well. I can tell the characters have had a lot of love and care put into them. The grammar is spot on, the characters all have full and robust arches, and the mystery parts of the book are very well timed.

Next, can I just go on record for how wonderful the chemistry is between Hunter and Emma as people? I need to talk about this because it not only adds to the plot of the story but the story movement. They are an amazing couple of people, they work well together, and Hunter is such an interesting character. He has a lot of very good traits, he’s got an interesting story to him, and I am excited to see if he makes a return in future stories. I think what I like most about him, is that he can blend into a situation well, and it’s not always easy to write a character like that with such skill. Kelley did so well with him as a character. I mean he really is one of the bigger highlights to the book and I found the dynamic with Emma thus that much better.

And speaking of the mystery aspect, that was fun. It's not going to be something you can follow akin to Sherlock, so if you are a big mystery snob, this book may frustrate you at times. No, this rolls out beautifully in its way, with clues and exciting details layered between realistic situations. The character of Emma, who is our MC, is a well-rounded character. Emma's not a Mary Sue, and she's not an all-knowing detail driven detective either. She's a person, and she's an every woman. Emma is the type of well-balanced character I can relate to, and I feel genuine when she discovers things quickly.

The character of Lindsey is interesting as well. She's very helpful, and she has a unique take on things. Unlike Emma, Lindsey can come across as a bit of a calculated Red Herring creator all on her own, but I think that was the point.

Let's go into the murder mystery parts that are great. For one thing, the attack itself isn't a gory piece of nightmare fuel. Second, the discovery isn't either. I felt that the elements in place were heartfelt; I also enjoyed that anything discovered about the victim and possible suspects were realistic. Even when you get to a Red Herring, it's never "What? That’s not the killer?" or "Of course it's not." Instead, you have so many right elements that even at times you may think it is real.

The actual murderer is a great character, and I like how the exposition leads to it. I felt the ending wasn't too contrived, but there were elements of the end that also felt at times like a scene from "Friends." What I mean by that, everything fell into place; it's just that there are some somewhat rough bits to it.

Overall, this is a decent mystery book. I think any teacher would love it, especially an English Teacher or Creative Writing teacher.

Score

With all of that in mind and my scoring math taken into consideration, I graded “Death by Diploma” an 89/100 which is a Four Star review on Goodreads and Amazon.com.

Get this for that murder mystery teacher you have in your life. They will thank you for it!

Until tomorrow my friends, have the best day.