Knitting Tales, Tales of Woe

I am tossing another book into the garbage. This summer at a garage sale I purchased mysteries by two authors new to me, one with a sewing circle as the setting, another, Maggie Sefton, with a yarn shop as the setting. No more of either.

In first book, which name and author I cannot remember, the author used "pale yellow" to describe the colors of three different items at three different times. It would have been fine had she tied it to the character and her emotional relationship to that color or some such thing, but she did not. Second thing: the character, Tory Sinclair, was new to the town, just over a break-up with her fiance. Widowed school teacher in town meets her and clearly starts falling in love. I want to shout, "Haven't you guys heard anything about boundaries in professional roles? Haven't you heard about rebound relationships?" I like a book that understands all of  human nature and does not distort one truth to promote another.

I got two Maggie Seftons. I read the first and thought, way too slow. Could use some editing. I have a red pen, and could help her out. Let's change the sentence structure here, delete this here, use the correct name there. No real mystery, no Agatha Christie gut-wrenching, psychological, freaky, Endless Night twist. It included the politically correct friendly, gourmet, wine connoisseur male-who-inserts-his-private-part-into-the-end-of-the-digestive-tract-of-another-male character, of course. But nothing sexually explicit, which was a plus.

So on to the second book, which I read just because I had it. What a waste of time. It had the usual  Sefton repetitions, the coffee, the upended bottles of  Fat Tire Ale, and the countless trips to the yarn shop. In this book, the goal of Kelly's so-called friends was to get her to go to bed with her friend, Steve. Never mind that she and Steve had already played house together, and that when he suffered bad economic times, Kelly abandoned him. Let's ignore the lie that somehow Kelly needed sex to have emotional wholeness, and that it was okay to use another person (Steve) to achieve that wholeness. Let's ignore the lie that sex is just sex, with no emotional or physical consequences when it takes place outside of a 'til death do us part marriage. Let's ignore that real police officers, retired or otherwise, do not share case information with those who do not have the right to know. Same with lawyers. Let's ignore the  fact that while Kelly castigated Zoe for not leaving her abusive husband, she also failed to report Oscar's criminal behavior, thus enabling him to continue. Let's ignore the  fact that Steve did not seem to be able to control his desires at the bar, and that Kelly had to use physical violence to keep herself top dog with Steve. Let's ignore the fact that violence was the same thing that Kelly abhorred in Oscar, but suddenly for her, it was an acceptable game. Same for drunkenness. In Oscar it was evil, but it was fine for Megan. Oh, and to call it a good book, I would have to ignore the dangling clue of the phone call between Zoe and Vera, which was never mentioned again. And the boredom as I waded to the end of the book, knowing who had done it.