Blue Smoke and Murder

By: Elizabeth Lowell

Narrated by: Carol Monda

Length: 11 hrs and 16 mins

Publisher's summary

Jill Breck was just doing her job as a river guide when she saved the life of Lane Faroe, son of two of St. Kilda Consulting's premier operators. But when a string of ominous events - including a mysterious fire that kills her great-aunt and a furor in the Western art world raised by a dozen Breck family paintings - culminates in a threat to her life, Jill reluctantly calls in a favor.

Zach Balfour works part-time as a consultant for St. Kilda. His expertise is gathering and analyzing information from unlikely and often dangerous sources. Though he's got the skills to be a highly effective bodyguard, being a bullet catcher isn't his preferred way to spend time.

Protecting Jill will take him into familiar territory - among a strange, savagely competitive bunch of collectors who'll do anything to stay at the top. But Jill is in deeper waters than she's ever known; as she soon discovers, the perils of running wild rivers are tame compared with the hidden dangers in the high-stakes game of art collecting.

From the cozy rooms of the Breck homestead cabin to the cold multimillion-dollar galleries of the Western art circuit, Zach and Jill must race against time to unmask a ruthless killer hidden in a blue smoke of money, threats, lies, and death.

©2008 Two of a Kind, Inc. (P)2008 HarperCollins Publishers

Below the standard for this series

Elizabeth Lowell is phoning it in. The characters just don't come to life, and the dialogue between the female protagonist and her love interest is laughable. I think it was supposed to be funny at least part of the time, but it just felt juvenile to me.
Other books in the St. Kilda series are pretty good, but this one just never got to humming. However, there is some interesting background on Western art and some good slams on the FLDS church.

Good

I thoroughly enjoyed this book about the St Kilda Operatives so much so that I went looking for any others. The Narrator handle the characters very well. Pity this narrator did not do the first book

More good than bad

This was an engaging thriller with interesting components. A bit heavy on the hormones; I found it hard to believe that a pair of extremely competent and independent superheros would take time out of an impending-death situation for some bump-and-giggle. Seems to me such protagonists would have been eliminated before a story could be written about them. Unfortunately there were several flukes like that, like superheros who can arrange planes, accommodations, security and more with a blink of an eye, forgetting nothing, yet not recharge a battery. Gimmee a break. Still, it was worth the read.

Sophmore Slump?

Ms. Lowell needs to decide if she is writing fiction or an art history text book. She spends so much time on the history of Western American Art that she seems to have forgotten the plot.

And her editor needs to understand that the readers can grasp growing sexual tension without repeating every other paragraph that the heroine found the hero's body "edible."

Blue Smoke and Murder

Great story. I thought the narrator did a good job of handling many different parts within the story both male and female without sounding silly. Story kept my interest and I didn't want to stop listening.