Board to Death by C.J. Connor
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This is about 30-year-old guy who chooses to come back to Utah and help run a board game shop for his father as his father was diagnosed with a medical issue. He is gay and recently divorced. A shop owner neighbor comes into his life as a murder takes place on his doorstep. The murder seems to revolve around an original game that predates Monopoly. There is a small amount of romance and an even smaller amount of mystery. I am not sure how to classify this one. I cannot find a genre to place it in. The book dips it’s toe into a few different classification pools but never takes the plunge. The main character, Ben, annoyed me slightly. I am not a fan of the meek, easily scared, or pitiful literary trope and unfortunately Ben fits this mold. Granted, it is not as strong with him as other characters, but it still applies. There were two quotes that I did enjoy though. “I loved attempting to read Dune. It was so much easier to accomplish than actually finishing it.” I relate as I have attempted several times to get more than 50 pages into that novel. The other I thought was funny and unique was “I’d had a bowl of Thin Mints doused in milk for breakfast, for goodness sakes. You can’t ethically expose the world to yourself when you are in that state of mind.” Sadly, two good quotes do not a good novel make. Ben was not a good sleuth (he just started giving all his own information away at one point) and it felt that he had no impact on moving the story along. I can’t recall of anything he did by himself. It was bland but a very easy read. I did like that it had queer elements though. You can skip Board to Death and play Solitaire instead.
View all my reviews