Charlotte Illes is Not a Detective

Charlotte Illes Is Not a Detective by Katie Siegel 352 pages

“Nancy Drew” was the first book series I read as a child, and, if memory serves, I did read all fifty-six of them.  Maybe it was because the back cover copy tells us that it is nostalgic (albeit a much younger nostalgia than mine) that Nancy resurfaced in my memories. Still, it was fun to relive those wonderful days of lying on the couch consumed with the latest un-putdownable episode that evoked such warm feelings for Charlotte.

When Charlotte “Lottie” Iles was ten years old, she solved a small mystery at her elementary school.  She became an overnight sensation and was soon helping lots of people solve little mysteries at school and in the community.

But now Charlotte is twenty-five years old. She is unemployed, lives with her mom, had no love life and a small social life. She is worried that she has “peaked.” But the universe is giving her one more chance to get her act together.

It seems that the company where her brother’s girlfriend, Olivia. works is trying to organize. Seems outdated in 2023 that unions are still considered a threat and that companies will do anything to stop it. But once I started reading this book, I saw it everywhere on the news. And so a dead body of one of the other employees turns up.  But that’s not the thing that captures Charlotte’s attention. It’s the murder and the disappearance of Brian, one of Olivia’s co-workers that lures Charlotte back into detecting. Joined by her two best friends, Lucy and Gabe, the trio pits their heads together and gets to work.

A cozy mystery disguising itself as a mystery, this mixture of past and present amateur sleuthing gives “Charlotte Illes is Not a Detective,” a wonderfully innocent, yet amusing, aura that last until all the mysterious elements are resolved.

Therefore, “Charlotte Illes is Not a Detective,” received 5 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

Release date is June 27, 2023. 

The Woman in the Movie Star Dress

The Woman in the Movie Star Dress by Praveen Asthana    300 pages

This is one of those books that I picked up based on its title and dust jacket. It reeks of film noir and Old Hollywood.  It does…in a way. The story’s premise is that clothes carry a ghostly fragment of whoever wears them, and when another wears them, those remaining fragments transfer to the new wearer.

Genevieve works in a vintage clothing story in Hollywood. They have clothing worn by Elizabeth Taylor, Natalie Wood, Marilyn Monroe, Mae West and a host of others. One day the store receives a box of clothing that was found in an abandoned storage unit. The best item in the box is a scarlet dress.

Soon a man comes looking for the box, in particular the scarlet dress. But, alas, the dress has already been sold. The man is a throwback to the ‘40s men’s style. He intrigues Genevieve.

Needing something to wear to a party, Genevieve borrows an outfit from the store. Knowing who wore it, gave her the courage to be more outgoing, even flirty. And so begins Genevieve’s interest in how the transference of personality can travel through a person’s old clothing.

The prologue is pretty good. A woman wearing a scarlet dress heads out in a 1954 convertible to kill someone. That’s all the reader gets. The story then switches to Genevieve’s point of view.

For me, this was a weird story. Each chapter title was the name of an old movie star, like Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, Humphrey Bogart, and others, but the chapters themselves had little or nothing to do with the actor.

There are tidbits of gossip about the stars but given that there many inaccuracies in the story, I wasn’t sure if they were real or if the author had invented them

I expected a lot more from this novel and was terribly disappoint that it is such a dull read. I didn’t understand how Genevieve came to “discover” the personality transference, But I did get how she came to believe that if she was wearing another’s clothing, how she could become begin to act like them. 

The Woman in the Movie Star Dress gets two stars in Julie’s world.