Publishable by Death

By: A C F Bookens

Narrated by: Sarah Pesek

Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins

Publisher's summary

Change is hard in a small Southern town, especially when it brings a side of murder.

All Harvey Beckett wants to do is help the residents of St. Marin's find the perfect book for that moment, snuggle with her hound dog Mayhem, and be ignored by her cat Aslan. But when the small waterside town's newest resident discovers the body of the community's persnickety reporter in her bookshop storeroom just before her grand opening, Harvey can't help trying to solve the crime, even when it might cost her business and her life. The more questions Harvey asks, the more secrets she uncovers.

Will Harvey and her friends be able to solve the murder of the town reporter without her becoming a victim herself?

©2019 A C F Bookens (P)2021 Bryant Street Publishing

First time reading this author

Came across this book through an ebook newsletter and decided to give it a listen and I’m glad that I did. It was an enjoyable listen and I liked the characters and their interaction with each other.

Good intentions, poor execution

I’ve had my eye on this series for a while but have been reluctant to try it because so many of the negative reviews say the same thing—the book/author is racist. The author says she’s attempting to break readers’ habits of assuming a character is white by default unless otherwise stated. I commend that. It’s great that she’s as adamant about having a diverse cast, and that she doesn’t shy away from themes of racism in her cozy mysteries—a genre notorious for brushing too-hard topics under the rug.
Now, I’m a liberal-leaning person of color who likes cozies, so one would think I’d be the key demographic. Was the constant mention of people’s race as one of their main, if only, defining description annoying? Yes. In the early chapters, I thought people might have been a little too picky about this, but then I hit in a chapter where four race descriptions were given in a row to almost all minor characters.

There are much more creative ways to establish a person’s race without just flat-out stating it. If a person is described as having red hair, green eyes, and freckles, the reader can figure out the character’s race. And they’re likely to remember that description far more than “she was a tiny white woman.” There are many tiny white women in the world—give us a description about her other than skin color. One character was just labeled as “Asian.” That’s an extremely large category of people. She becomes a major character later, yet her heritage (even if the woman had been born and raised in America) was never even hinted at. Some key characters didn’t get a race description at all. Maybe the inconsistency was intentional, but it was unnecessarily distracting.

It was interesting that the bookstore that’s the cornerstone of the book used to be a gas station that had been in the Green Book, labeling it as a safe place for black travelers to visit during the Jim Crow era. If the author had made that fact something Harvey, the heroine, discovered over the course of the story through research, that would have been enough. Throw in some real-life history, maybe tie it to the current murder she’s trying to solve and leave it at that. It’s not that I think the author should shield her readers from difficult topics, it’s even if the author is operating from a positive place, the execution felt like she was trying to prove just how tolerant, just how knowledgeable, just how kind she is. It felt more self-congratulatory than it being a story about people living in a place with a dark past.

The author name drops black authors, books about black struggles, and the only movies mentioned were “black movies.” It was all too much. And this is coming from someone who is black herself. I don’t think the author was pandering, but I also see why readers thought she was trying entirely too hard.

Ironically, there was a portrayal of a black character that actually did strike me as racist. Marcus is young and angry—because of course he is…that’s usually the stereotype, right? When Harvey discovers Marcus is well-read (he was found reading one of Margaret Atwood’s lesser-known books), Harvey asks how he became an Atwood fan. That’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask a fellow bookworm. Harvey says the book he’s reading isn’t what she’d consider standard reading. I thought she meant not standard reading material found on high school reading lists. Oh, no. Harvey tells Marcus that she didn’t think Atwood was standard reading for “black men in America.” Excuse me? Are you really claiming that you, Harvey Beckett, the kindest white woman who has ever lived, has exclusive insight into what every “black man in America” is reading? How the author didn’t realize that stereotyping Marcus that way was the very thing she’s been trying to avoid was beyond me. Plus, it read as if Marcus was an anomaly because he was black and also *gasp* intelligent.

When the Green Book movie was mentioned, Harvey points out that when she watched the movie, something a black woman said in the lobby afterwards really stuck with her. Something akin to, “Oh great, another story where a white person saves us.”

And yet, who swoops in to save Marcus—an angry, (surprisingly) well-read, and seemingly homeless (despite having a mother he has a good relationship with) black man? Harvey. There was absolutely no bearing on the plot to have this down-on-his-luck person in the story. He was never a suspect. He merely served to show that while the townsfolk saw an angry black man, Harvey saw the good in him immediately. And, of course, was there to save him. There’s no reason why he couldn’t have just been a struggling student who needed extra cash—that’s the case for a lot of young people regardless of race. Heck, that was the case for Rocky. Why did the young black man have to be the one with the tragic backstory? Not every story about black people needs to be steeped in pain to be a story worth telling.

And then the mystery! I figured out the killer (and the motive) about halfway through. The killer was a person upset about racism both in the past and present, and killed someone whose racism sent the killer over the edge. On top of the motive being ludicrous, this same person killed a black officer, and slashed the tires of the black sheriff and spray painted the n-word on his car. How do all those actions come from the same person, especially when being upset about racism was what made the killer kill in the first place?

While I appreciate the author’s desire to make the world a little bit better through her books, I wish she was telling a story that was about *people* and not about her personal struggle to absolve her white guilt.