Book Review: Poison Pen by Sheila Lowe (Claudia Rose #1)

Stars: 4 out of 5

Pros: Strong plot, fun characters, LA setting

Cons: Mostly one plot element I didn’t like, a few other minor things

The Bottom Line:

A suicide note?

Claudia tries to find out

Promising debut

Was That a Suicide Note?

I’m a little embarrassed to admit just how long I have had a copy of Poison Pen by Sheila Lowe.  Let’s just say the book has gone through several publishers and iterations since I first bought a copy.  I’ve even had a friend who shares my reading tastes recommend it to me.  A couple of months back, I found out that the book had been edited before the most recent version was released, so I bought a copy of that and finally sat down and read it.

This is the first is the Claudia Rose series.  Claudia is a Los Angeles based forensic handwriting expert.  Naturally, this is me, so Claudia finds her skills getting her involved in crimes of various kinds.

Back in college, Claudia became friends with Lindsey Alexander.  While the two had a falling out several years ago, Claudia is still upset to learn that Lindsey has died.  Thanks to the note she left behind, the police have ruled it a suicide, but Ivan, Lindsey’s business partner, thinks that something happened to Lindsey.  He hires Claudia to look at the note and determine if Lindsey really wrote it or not.  Claudia does agree that it looks suspicious, but as she digs to find a hand writing sample she can use to make a definitive decision, she starts to uncover secrets that Lindsey and those around her were hiding.  Break ins and attacks lead her to think something else is going on.  Can she figure it out?

I was aware sitting down that, despite featuring an amateur sleuth, this was more of a soft-boiled book than the cozies I normally read.  As a result, there is a smattering of foul language and more violence and sex than I typically read.  (Although with the number of times I’ve said that recently, maybe that isn’t the case anymore.)  I do wish some of it had been toned down, but I still enjoyed the book.

The story starts quickly, and there is a lot happening to keep us engaged.  I did have some issues with the plot that gets into spoiler territories, but it could just be me.  I won’t let them keep me from reading another book in the series.  I did appreciate some late twists that kept me guessing.  I didn’t have everything pegged like I thought I did.

I really liked the characters.  Claudia has a couple of good friends we get to know in this book, and I hope we see more of them in the future.  I also enjoyed her relationship with her potential new love interest.  We spend more time talking about the suspects than talking to the suspects, but they seem real enough to make us care about the outcome.

The book was originally published in 2007.  The copy I read was published in 2021.  As a result, it contains a reference to COVID being in the recent past, which is weird given some other things that obviously date the book to 2007.  Yes, things really have changed that much.  Also, in the hard copy I read, there are more than a handful of missing words, usually the article “a.”  It was enough to be noticeable, even to someone who usually misses that type of things like me, but not enough to be anything more than annoying.

And, I loved the LA setting.  While the main characters are all fictional, there is some name dropping that was fun, and I enjoyed it when the action took us to some place that I recognized.

I’m glad I finally read Poison Pen.  I definitely plan to read the sequel and find out what Claudia gets up to next.  I just need to figure out how to keep it from taking me so long to do so.