Riley Thorn and the Dead Guy Next Door by Lucy Score

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Title: Riley Thorn and the Dead Guy Next Door
Author: Lucy Score
Series: Riley Thorn #1
Published by: Indie
Release Date: March 1, 2021
Format: Audiobook
Narrator: Natalie Duke
Length: 15 hours and 18 minutes
Genres: Mystery, Romance, Romantic Comedy, Contemporary Fantasy
Source: Audible
Reading Challenges: Lenoreo's 2023 Audiobook Challenge, Lenoreo's 2023 Backlist Reader Challenge, Lenoreo's 2023 COYER Chapter 1
Find it: Goodreads ✩ Amazon
My rating:

Blurb:

A nice, normal life. Is that too much to ask? For Riley Thorn it is. Divorced. Broke. Living with a pack of elderly roommates. And those hallucinations she’s diligently ignoring? Her tarot card-dealing mom is convinced they’re clairvoyant visions.

Just when things can’t get worse, a so-hot-it-should-be-illegal private investigator shows up on her doorstep looking for a neighbor…who turns up murdered.

Nick Santiago doesn’t play well with others. Unless the “others” are of the female persuasion. Wink. He’s a rebel, a black sheep, a man who prefers a buffet of options to being stuck with the same entrée every night, if you catch his drift.

When the pretty, possibly psychic Riley lands at the top of the list of suspects, Nick volunteers to find out whodunit. Only because he likes solving mysteries not because he wants to flex his heroic muscles for the damsel in distress.

All they have to do is figure out who pulled the trigger, keep the by-the-book detective with a grudge at bay, and deal with a stranger claiming he was sent to help Riley hone her psychic gifts. All before the killer discovers she’s a loose end that requires snipping.

My Review:

3.5 stars — This one was kind of slow for me.  And I think that part of that is because I listened instead of read.

The narrator’s style just didn’t work for me.  The funny thing is that I can see how it works well with the style of book that this was, but I have a lower tolerance of camp and this sort of wandered into that territory.  And it wasn’t so much that she was really campy, but her style combined with the words she was reading just felt caricaturish.  I feel like I might not have noticed or been as bothered if I read…but who knows.  I will say I’m bummed I already got book 2 on audio — serves me right, I should know better unless it’s a fave author/narrator.

This book had a whole bunch of elements that I often love — quirky characters, fairly normalish dorky main characters…but I just wasn’t super sucked in.  I enjoyed it, but I’m debating whether I want to try reading the next one to see if it works better for me.

The quirky characters were almost a little over the top for me…and there were so many of them.  I didn’t have trouble keeping them straight because they were all pretty unique, it just felt a bit overwhelming I guess.  On the surface I enjoyed all the little weird factions (hippy family, crazy old neighbours, Nick’s partners,  Gabe, Bert), but I wasn’t enthralled with any of them.  And I think the crazy background characters that felt more like caricatures mostly just annoyed me.

Riley was enjoyable for the most part.  She had some great sassy moments, and I enjoyed her dorkiness at times.  I kind of wish they’d explained, at least to the reader, why she was so stubbornly against her gifts earlier in the book, because without that explanation it made it hard to connect with her and not just get annoyed about it.

Nick had some great moments, but I am NOT a fan of the stupid male posturing shit that he would bring over and over again…it’s not sexy to me.  Maybe if it had been more just him having fun instead of being legitimately jealous and stuff it wouldn’t have been so bad.  I did appreciate how he would have internal debates with himself about the ways in which he was changing because of Riley…it was kind of adorable.

As for the mystery?  I never had much of a clue, and I don’t think I was supposed to…it was a very background part to the story.

So yeah.  I kind of want to try another book, but definitely not the audio…