On the Trail of a Curse Talisman
I haven’t been the biggest fan of the Braxton Campus Mysteries, but I’ve made it far enough I want to finish it. After all, Legally Blind Luck is book seven, which means I now have one more book to go.
Our main character here is Kellan Ayrwick, who has moved back to his hometown in Pennsylvania. His parents spent years working for Braxton College, and he’s now taken a job there as an associate professor. His return home has coincided with a bunch of murders in the area, and Kellan has been involved in solving them. Along the way, he’s started dating April Montague, the county sheriff.
The series has had some soap opera storylines along the way, and there are a lot of characters with so many interconnections it’s hard to keep them all straight. There is a list of characters at the beginning, but even with that, it takes work to remember all the relationships.
As this book opens, summer is just starting, and in the break before Kellan starts to teach a summer course, he is helping with an exhibit of African artifacts that is setting up on campus temporarily. However, moments before the official opening, Kellan stumbles on another dead body. He’s also hearing about a talisman that might be cursed. Is it on campus? What does its legend have to do with the current murder?
Those who are reading the series might be wondering about the cliffhanger we got in the final pages of the previous book. It isn’t too long before we find out what happened with that. I’m not going to say more other than it does tie into this book. I was rolling my eyes a bit when I realized that was going to be the case, but it mostly works. I mean, it was still a bit too much to believe, but I’ll let that slide. The soap opera of it all continues here, but I did mostly buy the climax when we got there.
The plot, as is often the case for this series, tries to do too much. The author mostly pulls it off, but not without some long passages of exposition. I admire the ambition, but I think the series would benefit from a little less of it.
I’ve complained in the past about how some of the characters interact, specifically how they treat Kellan. That was toned down here, which was nice to see. One of those characters had a minor roll, which helped. The characters themselves could have been a little stronger, but that’s a result of the large cast.
One thing that didn’t change was the poor dialogue. Even in the middle of a scene, we’d get some dialogue, then a summary of what the character said, then more dialogue. Why? This type of writing makes no sense to me and pushes me out of the scene. Quite often, the entire (long) paragraph could have been the character talking and it wouldn’t have bothered me the way this approach does.
Also, some more attention to detail would have been nice. I might have missed something, but I felt like the legend around the talisman changed part way through the book. I’ll admit I didn’t go back to double check on that, so I could easily be wrong. A few other inconsistencies bothered me as well.
Complaints aside, this wasn’t a bad book for the series. But it has its issues for sure. Those who have made it this far into the series will still want to read Legally Blind Luck.
Check out the rest of the Braxton Campus Mysteries.
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