White Satin & Murder   

Val Masters, Wedding Planner  

By Harper Harris

Brought to you by OBS reviewer Andra                   

Summary:

A missing fifty-thousand-dollar wedding dress. A clingy Yorkie. And a dead Maid of Honor.

It’s the first wedding Valerie Masters has ever planned and the start of her new business.

There’s money flowing in Buckingham Downs, California, a small coastal town largely taken over by the rich, where weddings are a billion-dollar business. Val works tirelessly to make sure this one- the very first that she’s been hired to plan- is perfect, juggling a temperamental florist, a diva cake baker, and a self-obsessed DJ who’s threatened to walk off the job if the Chicken Dance is requested.

Not to mention the biggest Bridezilla Val has ever seen, the bride’s “unique” family and snooty Maid of Honor.

Starting a new business is hard, and this first wedding is turning out to be more than Val bargained for. Right before the wedding, Val finds the Maid of Honor dead and the expensive, one-of-a-kind wedding dress missing!

Now, on top of getting a hitch-filled wedding to go off without a…well…you know, she has no choice but to solve this mystery. No wonder half of all new businesses fail!

The stakes couldn’t be higher. This socially influential family has already threatened to ruin Val if any part of the wedding is ruined.

But who among this motley cast of characters could be a murderer and a dress thief? And will Val figure it out in time to pull off the perfect wedding? Or will her business crash before it’s even started?

Review:

Val Masters has started a fledgling wedding planning business and Ginger (aka Bridezilla) is her first client. The story starts off two days before Ginger’s wedding where she is acting like a such a baby. Whine, whine and more whining. So right from the get go, I have NO sympathy for the bride.  And loads of sympathy for Val (except that she is a complainer as well) … she has more patience than I certainly would in those circumstances. 

I did note that there was a lot of complaining on Val’s part about the members of the wedding party..:

“…That all would have been fine and dandy if the bride wasn’t literally the worst person ever. An exaggeration, one might think – but then one would be wrong because Ginger Prentiss is a pill. She has this amazing quality of being a wholly annoying person. Just her entire being is irritating…. In fact, I’m not going to sit here and act like Ginger is the only one causing me to stress. Almost her entire wedding party – from the snobby Maid of Honor down to the consistently distracted groom – has managed to embody all the traits I could hat in any one person, all combined into the bunch of them.”

With such a difficult client, you can tell that something major is going to go wrong. And it does! The over the top, expensive wedding dress goes missing along with a dead Maid of Honor. So in order to salvage the wedding and Val’s company – she must solve the murder before the wedding so that the wedding goes off without a hitch.

At times it appeared like a wild goose chase trying to find the killer… and the dress, of course. Luckily the books redeeming quality was that the “whodunit” was disguised well and I was kept guessing farther along the story than I expected (which was good) – though I did have a guess early on, which did prove to be correct.

I liked the cover of the book, the puppy Buttons is cute. In fact, that was why I chose to try this author in a genre I quite enjoy. Though I truly hope it is a tad bit more … well…. more. I want Val to have more depth! And is there a romance in the future for Val? Time (and another book or two in the series) may tell.

A respectable start to a new series. I was not wowed; nor was I bored – it was just an okay read. I already have book two on my e-reader so I will carry on with Gold Envelopes & Murder.

*OBS would like to thank the publisher for supplying a free copy of this title in exchange for an honest review*