In this 9th book in the Jaine Austen series, Jaine is after an advertising gig from a mattress company, and the company’s owner has some sticky personal entanglements in the form of an ex-wife who he works closely with and owns half his businesses, and a new wife who throws herself shamelessly at him at work. (Jaine just wants to write ads for mattresses so she and her cat Prozac can eat. Meow.) When Bunny the new wife turns up dead, and Lance, Jaine’s neighbor, is blamed, she goes on the hunt for the killer. I especially loved the emails back and forth with Jaine’s parents in this one. ( )

Well, well what a twist! ( )

Marvin and Betty Cooper are a couple of which the better half is a trophy wife. She also happens to be the victim in this mystery story. The heroine's neighbor, Lance, is one of the prime suspects, prompting Jaine Austen to put on her thinking cap and play detective. Starring in the comedy department are Vladimir the Uzbek and Hank the Chef. See, I never do synopsis of a book, but here I had to post myself a reminder as to how a potentially good story can quickly go south. It's the lowest rated book in the series and I need to remind myself never to read it again. The best part of the book was the prolonged presence of the scapegoat, Bunny. I knew she would soon be put to sleep, and the build up was slow as it was effective. Bunny is way more hateful than previous victims. Low score notwithstanding, the book was good in splotches. It was just trying to do too much with too little. ( )

Death of a Trophy Wife is downright silly. Although the book is supposed to be a cozy mystery, I found it to be more food porn for junk food junkies than anything else. The unraveling of the mystery happens in spite of the protagonist, who spends most of her time diving into a jar of peanut butter with a spoon, extolling the virtues of her elastic-waist jeans, and creating a cantankerous personality for her cat, Prozac. The book is likewise plagued by long asides in the form of emails from the protagonist's parents, which do little more than show that "ridiculous" did not fall far from the fictional tree. Add in several unhealthy relationships and sloppy narration, and you get Death of a Trophy Wife. ( )

I downloaded this book from Amazon for free onto my iphone Kindle app. I had never heard of Laura Levine or The Jaine Austen Mysteries before and wasn't really sure what to expect. I have to admit that I was pleasantly surprised. Death of A Trophy Wife is the 9th book in the series and I hadn't read any of the others but, that didn't keep me from enjoying this book.
Jaine is an out of work freelance writer. While out with her friend Lance, Jaine is introduced to Bunny, Lance's best client at Neiman's shoe department. Bunny offers to introduce Jaine to her husband Marvelous Marv the Mattress King(he happens to be looking for a writer to whip up some new ads for his company). While Jaine is busy trying to win over said Mattress King someone kills Bunny and the police think it is Lance. Lance begs Jaine to help him prove his innocence by finding the real killer. Jaine who thinks of herself as an amateur P.I. agrees to help and gets herself into all kinds of fun for us, not so fun for her, trouble. This was a fun and light read that had me interested and amused. I was also happy that I never figured out who did it. I was guessing through the whole book and never got it right, which is a good thing. I hate it when a mystery is overly predictable. I would definitely read the earlier books in this series. Thanks Amazon for a fun, free read. ( )