[.ca] Mayhem at the Marina: A Lexy Hyatt Mystery (ISBN 1892281058)

Miller Pleases--Again:
Ms. Miller has pleased her mystery readers again in Mayhem At The Marina. Entertwining plot lines pick up from her first novel--The Killing At The Cat and send us off to a wonderfully full community of warm characters at a Florida marina. Descriptive and vivid, we cannot wait to thumb the pages and see what Lexy gets into next. A dysfunctional family murder, holiday fireworks, lust, love, compassion and Lexy's realization of her craving for Wren & settling down in a lesbian relationship which any hetrosexual would yearn for. A flowing read with just enough twists & turns to make us trowel our fingers through our hair & still smile.

Mayhem at the Marina:
Carlene Miller integrated character development, intrigue, sex, and mayhem all into a tidy little ball. The author gives each character many roles. Damaris was an alluring yet spooky international icon...fighting against the evils of her country. Charlie was the tough kid, needing some place to call home and some one to love her. And Lexy finds herself in many daring situations from being killed to being committed to Wren. I enjoyed the way community (straight & lesbian plus the spanning from the very young to the elderly) was integrated even though there were a few snags. It take a lot for people to step out and say they'll help when there are so many unknowns, yet Robbie, Marilyn (the Admiral), Meg, Cap, and Lexy all took a chance to make Charlie a new life. I found Lexy Hyatt's second book before her first and I can't wait to read it too.

Interesting people -- arresting plot; even better than Cat.:
In Mayhem at the Marina, Carlene Miller capitalizes on her ability to weave an intricate plot and to create believable characters. The plot is easier to follow than in Killing at the Cat, but is also more believably complex. Instead of setting up characters as suspects like tenpins and then knocking them down, she has the several strands of the plot quite logically produce people who have urgent motives for killing. The plot also deals with contemporary issues that matter to the people of her setting, a small marina in small-town Florida. As in Cat, Miller creates a sizable group of disparate characters, all of whom connect to each other in some way. Most are vividly drawn and individual, especially the perversely charming Charlie and the exotic Damaris. Some of the older women do not stand out as sharply -- Fran and Donna, for example -- but the "Iron Maiden" from Cat reappears, strong and unique. Even the men in this female genre are well-drawn, particularly Cap and the vile Steve. With this second book, Miller has honed her style, making it cleaner and sparer. Occasionally it becomes too spare, too many sentences beginning with the subject-verb beginning, for example. Gone are many of the heavy references to Lexy's past as an English teacher with a penchant for correcting grammar. Instead, that past is used to develop character, helping her to understand the teenage Charlie. Still somewhat annoying is the speech habit of starting sentences with the verb (Looked out and saw... Wanted to know...), a habit which could conceivably belong to one character but not to so many. One major drawback of the novel is the vagueness of Lexy's character and/or personality. It is difficult to understand sometimes what the other characters see in her when so many of them are more interesting than she is. Perhaps it is the choice of writing in the first person that makes Lexy not as fully limned. A future book written in third person might showcase Miller's considerable talent for creating believable characters in arresting plots.