I started to get eh about Boyer’s other series, so jumped into this one. “Big Trouble on Sullivan’s Island” has some of the same beats, but it just does not really work me in the end. Similar to her “Liz Talbot” series, this new series has a main character who is a P.I. [Hadley]. She is also focused on not swearing (it got old) and being a “lady” and some other things. I just think honestly this book was missing a lot of heart with the characters. Too many things were introduced in this one and I think could have been pushed for the second book. I just found the whole thing way too soap operaish to really enjoy.
“Big Trouble on Sullivan’s Island” follows 40 year old Hadley. Her age is important since she has a regular tradition before her actual birthday to hang out with two former neighbors, now surrogate fathers and to make sure her biological father knows how much she hates him. When Hadley is first hired to find out whether a client’s husband is cheating on her to then investigate the same client’s murder, Hadley has to deal with a past love and current problems.
I really wasn’t able to turn my brain off while reading. There’s a few things that rubbed me the wrong way. We find out why Hadley went into PI work and is not a super fan of cops and prosecutors and then she gets shouted down by someone who was like you need to ignore all of that because they really wanted her with her ex-cop boyfriend. I thought the character was making good points about how the innocent go to jail often in this country, police brutality, but then it was like Boyer wanted to shy away from that at a certain point.
Hadley as a character did not work for me. She had the nerve at one point to get funky with a Black woman and her use of language. I think Boyer was going for cute there, but it didn’t work. And Hadley is a plant based eater. It comes up a lot. And that is the only thing I am saying about it. There’s a lot of obsessive writing (to me) about food.
Speaking of the ex-cop boyfriend he was bland as anything. There’s no there there. I can’t see why she was still invested especially there was another love interest in this one that actually did come to life (for me) on the page.
We get a lot of characters to track in this one, and honestly after a while they started to blur for me except for Fish and Eugenia.
I did think it was quite cool that Boyer included some omnipotent narrator passages from a character called One feature I enjoyed is that occasionally the reader hears directly from Mrs. Josephine Huger who is an eye-witness to some of the events in the book. Her chapters were always freaking hilarious to me. If most of the book had been her, I would have loved it.
The plot meanders because of too many things being pushed out in this one and the flow was up and down.
The setting of South Carolina is definitely familiar to Boyer and that was great to read the descriptions of things.
The ending wrapped up things in a tidy bow and a pivot to the next book.