On the topic of Nina and Kevin – I really wasn’t put off by a cheating spouse storyline. Nina’s being a landscape gardener really has no impact on the case (a side-story about Nina’s tools going missing ends up nowhere near the actual murder) and for that reason the entire series feels like it’s starting out on uneven ground … especially because Nina’s having a cop-husband is definitely not going to last, if the events in this book are anything to go by. Lily Bard was a cleaner, and literally had access to the skeletons in people’s closets. But normally the person’s average Joe job compliments their sleuthing in some way – Aurora Teagarden was a librarian, and all walks of life came through her stacks. This isn’t unusual for a cozy, when an average Joe thinks they can bring something to an unsolved case that the police can’t – it’s kinda the whole suspend disbelief catalyst behind every cozy. Little does Nina’s friend know that Nina and Kevin are splitsville, but Nina is still intrigued enough by the oddities in the man’s death to stick her nose in. Nina’s tentative connection to the investigation in her friend’s father-in-law’s death is that she has the ‘inside-scoop’ with her husband as the local cop. Webber’s ‘Nina Quinn’ ticks all these boxes, but still didn’t manage to sucker me in as wholeheartedly as Charlaine Harris did in her cozy hey-day. If you don’t know what a ‘cozy’ is, check out for some guidance – but in a nutshell there’s usually a punny title, small town mystery, unlikely armchair sleuth and I personally have a preference for some romance to balance-out the murder rate. It’s a sub-genre I fell I love with after ploughing through Charlaine Harris’s ‘Aurora Teagarden’ and ‘Lily Bard’ backlist, but I haven’t really had much luck in finding a cozy series I love as much as either of those since. To top it all off, one of Nina’s close childhood friends has just been devastated by the sudden death of her father-in-law, and reaches out to Nina to offer her (and Kevin’s) guidance when the family suspects foul play. Now Nina is living with Riley while Kevin shacks up with his new squeeze … at the same time Riley’s pet snake is MIA, and gardening tools from Nina’s thriving ‘Taken By Surprise’ landscaping business are missing. Nina and Kevin have been married for eight years, he an older widower came into the marriage with then seven-year-old son, Riley – but after an incident with lipstick on his boxers, Kevin came clean to cheating on Nina with his new partner. The books opens with 29-year-old Nina Quinn stuffing photos of her cheating cop husband down the garbage disposal. ‘A Hoe Lot of Trouble’ is the first book in the ‘Nina Quinn’ cozy mystery series by Heather Webber.
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