Undercover in High Heels
Grade : D

Undercover in High Heels is the third novel in a series about Maddie Granger, a 29-year-old shoe designer in Los Angeles. One good point of the novel is that you needn’t read the earlier installments to follow the basic plot. This is an independent story, with enough background information about the heroine, her friends, and her family inserted to make the reader understand the relationships. When choosing to review this book, I hoped for a fun read with a mixture of mystery and chick lit, two genres I usually enjoy. I ended up seriously disappointed, mostly due to a narrator-heroine I hated so much that in the showdown I caught myself hoping the villain would finish her off and thus end the book...and my suffering. Alas, with a first-person narrator, no such luck.

In the first few pages, Maddie’s hot policeman boyfriend Jack Ramirez phones her to cancel a date, claiming he must attend a meeting and mentioning a well-known hookup place as to where this meeting is to take place. In a fit of jealousy, Maddie follows him there, spots him with an attractive brunette, and creates a scene. The situation gets worse as the brunette whips out a gun, takes Maddie hostage, and shoots at some cars on the parking lot outside. Ramirez then tells Maddie that the brunette was an important informant, and that he has been demoted to bodyguard duty as a result of Maddie spoiling his case. His new job is to guard the life of a soap star who has been receiving threatening letters. To make it up to him, Maddie decides on the spot – against his express orders – to join the set. She and her best friend Dana manage to obtain positions as a wardrobe assistant and an extra respectively, and go detecting.

What follows is a short satire on life at the set of a soap. There are some funny vignettes of the contrast between the public image of soap actors and their hidden, not so stylish selves, but Gemma Halliday neglects to really explore this interesting setting, concentrating on Maddie’s adventures off-set instead. This is a waste, really, because these vignettes and a dead-on, hilarious scene in a toyshop are the novel’s best parts.

Soon the body of a stand-in is found in the soap star’s trailer, and now Maddie tries to find out if she was killed by accident or of she has some secrets of her own. Several eccentric minor characters help her with her quest, the most interesting being Felix, a British tabloid reporter, but again Gemma Halliday does not develop much further what might have been a strong supporting character.

Maddie is the kind of heroine who constantly gets into trouble. She is ditzy, never thinks before she acts, and often takes risks in a truly TSTL manner. If that alone were not off-putting enough, I found her truly disagreeable because she is entirely without moral scruples. She lies to everyone, steals a friend’s car, happily endangers herself and others with her mad schemes, and generally rides roughshod over everyone. She spends the greater part of the novel running from her boyfriend, not answering his calls, and in fact shows far greater loyalty to her best woman-friend, and I wondered what made him put up with it. She exploits her friends without once considering their feelings, obviously thinking her asking prettily will make anything okay. If I hear the expression “pretty, pretty please” once more in the near future, I will throw up.

I found the novel’s style another stumbling block. What was, like, charming in Clueless, does so not work here for me. No kidding. Geez, do 29-year-old women in L.A. really talk like teenagers? And if they do, um, do I want to read about it? Ohmigod! No! Seriously. So, with a truly obnoxious heroine and quite a lot of wasted potential, Undercover in High Heels is a novel to give a miss.

Reviewed by Rike Horstmann
Grade : D
Book Type: Chick Lit

Sensuality: Subtle

Review Date : August 22, 2007

Publication Date: 2007/09

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Rike Horstmann

High school teacher. Soccer fan (Werder Bremen, yeah!). Knitter and book-binder. Devotee of mathematical puzzles. German.
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