Death by Sample Size by Susie Black

Death by Sample Size by Susie Black
Holly Swimsuit Mystery Book 1
Publisher: The Wild Rose Press
Genre: Mystery/Suspense/Thriller, Contemporary
Rating: 3 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

Everyone wanted her dead…but who actually killed her?

The last thing swimwear sales exec Holly Schlivnik expected was to discover ruthless buying office big wig Bunny Frank’s corpse trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey with a bikini stuffed down her throat. When Holly’s colleague is arrested for Bunny’s murder, the wise-cracking, irreverent amateur sleuth jumps into action to find the real killer.

Nothing turns out the way Holly thinks it will as she matches wits with a wily murderer hellbent for revenge.

There’s more than one way to make a splash in the swimming suit industry.

The pacing was handled nicely. I appreciated the fact that the author spent so much time explaining the characters, their relationships to each other, and what the swimwear industry was like in the beginning. While it did slow things down a little bit temporarily, all of these details were critical in order to understand why Bunny was killed as well as why each individual suspect might have had reason to murder her. It was also nice to see the pacing speed up after the audience knew everything they needed to about these topics and the investigation began.

This book included a huge cast of characters. So many different people were introduced in the first few scenes that I struggled to remember who they all were and how they were connected to Holly or Ditzy Swimwear in general. This was something I continued to have trouble with later on in the storyline as well due to how often new characters were introduced as the mystery deepened. While I understood why most of them were included, getting to know so many new folks over and over again did make this hard for me to read at times as I tried to keep everyone organized in my mind.

Ms. Black had a detail-oriented writing style that worked well for this genre. I especially liked the scenes she wrote that described the more unsavoury elements of the personalities of certain characters. She really knew how to show the audience who someone was, warts and all. The settings and plot were given similar levels of attention as well which made it easy to visualize everything that happened.

Death by Sample Size was a fun summer read.