Wildcat Wine

Wildcat Wine
By Claire Matturro

Trashy mystery books with sassy female heroines are for me like a piece of carrot cake with cream cheese icing that I had once as a child. I remember it as being the single most delicious thing I have ever eaten and I am constantly trying (and failing) to replicate the experience. No cake is ever quite moist and carroty enough. No icing quite creamy enough. I still love carrot cake, but each first bite is always a little bit disappointing, no matter how good the cake is, because it can never live up to my memory of the perfect piece of carrot cake. I think my obsession with the genre can also be traced back to my first Nancy Drew book and that moment when I realized that I loved Nancy Drew and that there were like fifty more Nancy Drew books that I hadn’t even read yet. I could spot those yellow covers in any library, bookstore or yard sale from twenty feet away… I still have my prized Nancy Drew collection stored at my parents' house.

I digress. Wildcat Wine: it’s got a lot of right ingredients – not carrots in this case, but a neurotically endearing young heroine – yet it doesn’t really live up to its potential. I liked Lilly, who is an obsessive-compulsive litigation lawyer - although she's no Nancy Drew. Matturro did a good job of building the plot so that I hadn’t figured it all out by page 10, but when it all finally came together it made sense. Matturro tried to build a bit of a romantic element into the plot, but it really fell flat and detracted from the book for me. All in all it was a good mindless read.