The Love Detective

Angela Dyson

Average Rating 8/10 (2 Reviews)

The first in a hilarious new series featuring a regular girl set down a path strewn with misadventures and murder to her destiny as The Love Detective.

Clarry is 26, attractive, funny - and on the road to nowhere. Living a makeshift existence as a waitress, she knows life should be led with some sort of plan, but unfortunately planning is something she needs to get around to. Enter her best friend Laura with a seemingly simple request: check out Simon, estate agent and new boyfriend, to make sure he really is interested in Laura and not the solicitor help she can provide. Clarry is no detective, unless you count tracking down where her next tip is coming from. Still, what harm could a little amateur sleuthing do?

With the aid of Flan, a glamorous septuagenarian, Flan's lover, and a cast of colourful characters from the restaurant she works at, Clarry plunges into the investigation with a few pitfalls, pratfalls and a dodgy moment where she's mistaken as a pole dancer (and not in a good way). It isn't until 1) she discovers that Simon's a two-timing creep, and 2) in a sinister turn, she uncovers an evil criminal enterprise, that she realises amateur sleuthing is not for the faint of heart!

Cynical and yet romantic, Clarry is an unlikely heroine that readers will both identify and fall in love with. Her misadventures and comical outlook mesh brilliantly with a thrilling story that will appeal to readers of romance, crime and chick lit. Set to be the first in an entertaining new series, you don't need to follow the clues to know The Love Detective is one book you don't want to miss out on!

Book 2 - The Love Detective: Next Level is due to be released September 2019.

About the Author:
Like her heroine, Angela Dyson has had a myriad of jobs that she's only half-paid attention to, including working for a record label, waitressing, some pluz-size modelling (strictly clothes on), and palm reading on a Greek Island. She's hard at work on the next in The Love Detective series.

Review by Ben Macnair (010520) Rating (6/10)
Review by Chrissi (300419) Rating (9/10)

Review by Ben Macnair
Book Source: Not Known
Rating 6/10
This is one of those novels that flits from one genre to another. It is a romantic comedy. A Crime Thriller. A psychological study. A character study. A state of the union diatribe. It is all of these things.

Clarry Pennhaligan is 26 year old waitress, who is drifting happily along in her life, with a circle of friends of all generations, but into her world comes her best friend Claire, who has her suspicions about her latest boyfriend, Simon.

Simon is outwardly perfect. Charming, debonair, and a successful Estate Agent, but as Clarry, with no previous experience as a private detective, looks beyond the carefully constructed façade, she discovers more than she would like.

As it moves along, the book, which is quite a hefty tome at more than three hundred pages, Clarry finds herself deeper and deeper into a situation, and with only her friends at the café, old friend Flan, and a lot of luck on her side, she find herself in situations that are at once both dangerous, but also incredibly unlikely. Although we are meant to suspend disbelief in fiction (it is how so many crime fiction thrillers and television programmes operate these days) there are some elements of the story, and the narrative that don’t add up, but that shouldn’t detract from the action packed scenes in the book, the sense of well-drawn characters, of a world that feels safe, with people that care about each other.

The book goes from light-hearted froth, to tackling human trafficking, but the writing style, and the sense of the plot means that each action has a certain sense to it. The book has been a commercial success, and the sequel The Love Detective: The Next Level was released in 2019.
Ben Macnair (1st May 2020)

Review by Chrissi
Book Source: Author
Rating 9/10
Clarry is a girl after my own heart, she likes wine and exercises so that she can fit into her (normal human sized) jeans. She is not really sure what she wants to do with her life, but for now working as a waitress is enough. Her best friend Laura is a solicitor who works with wills and estates and she is not having a run of good luck with men. The current beau is an estate agent and she is not sure whether he likes her for her or for the work that her firm can put his way. So she asks Clarry to check him out, and after some thinking about her lack of skills in this area, she goes for it.

The characters in the book are well-written and for the most part, lovely. We meet Clarry’s long-term friends and some new ones as we go along. The writing is beautifully edited and romps along at a good pace. There is enough background to the story that you feel you know Clarry. She is not a two-dimensional character, she is brave and funny and compassionate and you are with her every step of the way.

I sat and read this book in one afternoon, unable to put it down, it is a big bold story from an author with no other published titles but I really hope that there are more to come, and soon. There are the first two chapters for a second book in the back of my copy, but I cannot read them because they are only a teaser… does anyone read these and put the book down and find that the wanting of the new one kind of spoils the enjoyment of the one you have just read? Because enjoy it I did… this deserves to be huge.
Chrissi (30th April 2019)