Genre: Mystery
Published: 2011
Personal rating: 2.5/5
Yearly count: 1
Cassandra "Casey" Calhoun's passion for gardening has carried her to President's Park on which sits the White House. But when she finds a dead body in a trash can, Casey has to root out a killer before she ends up planted herself.
This series has the unfortunate luck of being compared to The White House Chef series by Julie Hyzy, which I love. And even worse, it pales in comparison. Where Julie Hyzy makes her characters competent like you would expect from people working in the White House, Dorothy St. James’ characters seem bumbling, Casey especially. It makes you wonder why they haven’t been fired yet. Besides that, they seem to do very little actual work….but that could just be me.
Casey thinks she knows everything just because she loves to read mystery books, but if she’s so good a detective, then why doesn’t she at least question the sudden interest of Templeton in her while he reportedly only dates supermodels and celebrities? But Casey is not the only one to act especially stupid. I cannot believe that a member of the elite CAT team of the Secret Service would take a civilian who’s a material witness to a murder – not to mention someone he seems to like – with him to apprehend a murderer. The characters behaved silly and that made things seem unrealistic.
The final nail in the coffin of this sub-standard series was the fact that the author dropped a rather broad hint about the true occupation of Casey’s parents, yet didn’t pursue it at all. An obvious hook to get the reader to pick up the next book. Perhaps she knew she needed one?
The only good thing about this was the mystery, I quite liked the puzzle of figuring out who did what and why. All in all this was a good idea but a bad execution, and I will not be picking up the next book in this series.
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