Murder In the Hamptons – Amy Garvey

I ended up with this book in the TBR pile quite by accident. I meant to send it to a fellow trader but when I bought it at Amazon I ordered it sent to me by mystake. It was more expensive to send it back so I just got her another copy and kept this one.

Now I wanted to trade it but decided to read it before sending it out. I didn’t actively disliked it but I didn’t like it either.

Maggie Harding has a few rules for living. Order, control and carefully checked-off-to-do-lists equal a safe life. Safe is good. What's not good is, oh hmm maybe having a wild passionate, naked pizza-eating weekend fling with Tyler Brody the kind of guy that leaves a girl shaken and stirred deep down. Bad. Bad. Bad. What to do? Run away. Constraint is better than chaos! Right? So what's that same girl to do when she runs into the guy five years later at a big Hamptons bash. And he is staring at her with that naughty, right-here-right-now grin, while she is trying not to make a idiot of herself in front of lots of rich people and "It" list Hollywood stars? Make another run for it. Except that she can't. because somebody's dead on the lawn and "house party" has just become "house arrest". The only way out of this insanity is for Maggie to find the murdere herself, even if the biggest mystery is why she ever believed that saying bye to Tyler was the right thing...

Maggie plans to spend the weekend helping her friend Lucy organising a party at an exclusive home in the Hamptons. When she gets there she finds Tyler with whom she had a weekend of wild sex 5 years ago.

I never could understand what Tyler saw in Maggie, or why she run away 5 years ago. After a while it seemed they spent all their time in bed and none talking. Besides Tyler seemed like a really nice person and I really couldn’t understand why Maggie kept trying to avoid him, either 5 years ago or today, he didn't seem the "love them and leave them" kind of guy that would hurt her.

The action is further complicated by a murder of a famous movie star. I had a problem with the suspense part too. After the murder happened I had a difficult time trying to figure out why were the characters behaving like they did. The strongest part ended up being that last one when the character’s connection to the victim is explained and we find out the dirty secrets of most of them. The killer was a surprise but I had lost interest by then. I felt it had a lot of potencial, it was advertised as a whodunit and I’ve been really into those but in the end it fell short of my expectations.

Grade: C