Who Eliminated Wren’s Landlord?
Over the last couple of years, I’ve started to really get into board games again, so I’ve been keeping my eyes opened for some good board games themed cozies. That’s why Player Elimination, Shelly Jones’s debut, caught my attention. Sadly, it wasn’t as good as I’d hoped it would be.
Our main character is Wren Winters, a widow who had opened a game store in a small college town in Massachusetts. She has an uneven relationship with her landlord. One day things seem fine, but then he is threatening to use the space for something else. The one consistency is his interest in board games. However, he usually plays by himself, off in a corner of the space Wren has for people to play games in her store.
One morning, Wren arrives at the shop to find that the police outside. Someone killed her landlord in her store. With the police looking at her and her employee, can Wren figure out what really happened?
The premise and story have promise, but there were several things that kept me from being fully invested.
Let’s start with the one that is going to be the most controversial. Wren’s employee, Charlie, goes by they/them pronouns. I tried. I really did try to read this book with an opened mind. But I found myself distracted, watching the grammar, every time that Charlie was on the page, which was frequently. There were only a couple of times where the writing was actually awkward, so I am impressed by that since group scenes could have been very confusing. Still, it proved to be a distraction for me as I was reading.
Unfortunately, the characters overall didn’t really come alive for me. Wren has a core group of close friends who get plenty of page time, but we only get to know them on a superficial level. It kept me from getting fully invested. The suspects don’t fare any better.
While there was an interesting plot here, it also doesn’t live up to its potential. Wren and her friends spent more time discussing theories than they did gathering new information. For me, both are important aspects of a good mystery. Things did improve in the final act, and I appreciated how what we learned came together in the end.
Even the gaming aspect fell a little flat for me. While I expected the book would contain some fictional games, it appears most were. And many of them we got a bit of a discussion about how they were played but no actual game name. It’s a shame because some sounded fun.
Player Elimination is one of those books that showed promise, but needed another draft to truly make the characters and their world come alive.
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