Truly, Madly
by Heather Webber
Book 1 of Lucy Valentine
Plus, her rent is due.
Here’s the problem: Lucy doesn’t have the knack for matchmaking. According to family legend, every Valentine has been blessed by Cupid with the ability to read “auras” and pair up perfect couples. But not Lucy. Her skills were zapped away years ago in an electrical surge, and now all she can do is find lost objects. What good is that in the matchmaking world? You’d be surprised. In a city like Boston, everyone’s looking for something. So when Lucy locates a missing wedding ring—on a dead body—she asks the sexy private eye who lives upstairs to help her solve the perfect crime. And who knows? Maybe she’ll find the perfect love while she’s at it...
Truly, Madly is an extremely enjoyable start to a cute cozy mystery series. I loved all the characters, and while I typically don't have any good feelings about the male love interests, Sean Donahue actually turned out quite charming. Lucy Valentine is an interesting character with an interesting psychic ability, and while I thought the way in which her secret was revealed to the world was a little too comical for my liking, I like the direction the entire series is taking.
Lucy is a great main character to follow and I enjoy her resourcefulness and her determination. I also feel I like her reasons behind why she would readily take over her father's business even without the requisite aura-seeing abilities. I like seeing the more vulnerable side of her she shows, admitting how she really feels about not having those aura-seeing abilities, and instead has a psychic ability that can only find inanimate objects belonging to people who are actually thinking about said inanimate object.
This shows in those moments when she truly feels her abilities are useless to help find the lost little boy because she cannot find actual living beings.
Anyway...
Lucy's parents were just strange, and I might have some issue with how they kind of just skip town. The other characters introduced also have a lot of potential for great things in future installments: Lucy's two best friends, Marisol and Emerson; Detective Aiden Holliday; Butch, the not quite butcher who looks like Matt Damon; Dovie, Lucy's paternal grandmother; Raphael, the driver; and many, many more. I like a good series with a lot of great characters to play off of!
I'd love to see more of all of these characters, because they were quite glossed over. You get to meet them, but you don't really get to know them yet, and I'd love to get to know all of these characters.
And there were animals! I love a good story with lots of animals, and there are three: Odysseus, the one eye'd hamster; Grendel, the three-legged cat; and Thoreau, the tiny three-pound Yorkie. The use of literary figures to name their pets felt a little pretentious, but I'll ignore that, because who am I to question what you name your pets, right? But Lucy's penchant for doing difficult math problems when she's nervous felt a little awkward, if only because I'd probably only stress myself out trying to figure out long division. Because I don't like math.
The murder mystery was serviceable, if a little predictable. So I'm not complaining. In fact, I liked the side tangent of Lucy finding the Little Boy Lost more than I liked the murder mystery.
I will definitely be reading more from this series and maybe even more from this author as well.
***
2016 Reading Challenges:
• Goodreads Reading Challenge
• BookLikes Reading Challenge
• Bookish Resolutions Challenge
• 2016 Halloween Bingo
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