I grew up in St. Louis and was familiar with Elaine Viets' funny Post-Dispatch columns about city life, so when I saw she had written a mystery I was eager to see what it was like. I wasn't disappointed. It was fun to read a mystery with references to my home town, and the satire about the newspaper where her heroine works was especially funny since I've worked on newspapers for quite a number of years. My only criticism is that it was fairly easy to figure out who the killer was, but I still enjoyed the book immensely and highly recommend it.

Viets gives us savy, sharp witted Francesca Verling and a great read! An inside look at the world of the newspaper game, suspense and characters to easily become attached to/or despise. They are honest, gritty and her descriptions are priceless!

Francesca Vierling, an in-your-face, sharp-tongued, "St. Louie Woman" is someone you'll want to get to know. "Rubout," the second of her adventures, following "Backstab," is a cleverly written, fast-paced mystery that takes you on a wild ride from St. Louis's biker culture to its cultured elite in search of a brutal killer. A great read that's hard to put down.

Before I moved to St. Louis in 1990 (where I lived for a year) one of the first things I did was look for an informative local interest book. This book filled the bill. At the time, Elaine Viets was a columnist for the St. Louis paper, and this book is a collection of her columns about quirky people and customs in this beautiful, doomed old city. Her essay on brain sandwiches alone was worth the price (as I recall, she mentions the Haven near Carondelet Park, someplace on South Broadway, and Pat's on Oakland).

Shop Till you Drop by Elaine Viets is her best mystery so far and she's written some good ones.
It can't be easy to write a WITTY mystery, but Viets manages to add humour without letting it slide into slapstick.
This one had me interested all the way through. I didn't guess the plot ahead of time and I often do as I am addicted to mysteries and frequently quit because the plot is so obvious. This book kept me facinated with intricate twists and turns.
The Characters are what really enhanced the book, they had depth and realism - I CARED about what was happening to Helen and the rest of the people.
It is a relief to read something that has normal, struggling people as main characters instead of a fake New York or San Frisco Glamourous lifestyle. It had a great South Florida locale.
The last page suggests Helen's next job and Viet's next book, I hope. I can't wait to read more adventures of Helen.
This is a warm, witty book, I can recommend without reservation!

Helen Hawthorne has run away from her Missouri home and her husband of 17 years to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where she has taken a job selling designer clothes to skinny rich women. When the body of a skinny woman of her acquaintance is found stuffed into a barrel bobbing in the bay, Helen is forced into the role of sleuth.

SHOP TILL YOU DROP is amply populated with South Florida "characters"-some endearing to Helen, some maddening, and some just plain odd. But surprisingly, they all come across as believable. Even Helen's reason for ditching a successful career to work for minimum wage makes sense once the reason is revealed. And her new identity as a lowly shop girl gives her authentic appreciation and insight into the world at the bottom of the heap.

Elaine Viets is a seasoned writer who knows how to tell a story. She kept me reading up to the very satisfying conclusion, when Helen deftly wields the dead-ender's secret weapon. This is the first in a new "dead-end job" series, and I eagerly await Helen Hawthorne's next work adventure.

of shopping in a snooty, upscale Boutique and watching CSI.

The main character, Helen has traded a lavish lifestyle to working in a clothing Boutique named Juliana's in Florida for minimum wage. The door always stays locked and is only opened for the rich and beautiful.

Helen discovers that Christina (Juliana's Manager) has a special relationship with each customer. She refers the best plastic surgeons, knows how to immigrant housekeepers and the perfect hit man.

Things turn sour when Christina is found floating in a barrel in the bay. Her customers are mournful, but more desperate to retrieve their secrets that Christina was holding. It's up to Helen to solve the mystery.

I knew that this would be a great read when I saw that Jane Heller called this book, "Irrestible, a heroin with a sense of humor and a gift for snappy dialogue" since Heller is one of my favorite authors.

If you like Heller's collection, you will love Shop till You Drop.

I don't know St. Louis, but Elaine sure does. She took me on the 'Grand Tour' through her books. She knows St. Louis like Laura Lippman knows Baltimore. I have lived in Detroit and Baltimore; and can really relate to the neighborhoods of St. Louis that Ms. Viets describes so well. Combine that with a good mystery with well developed plot lines and realistic characters and ya got a fantastic page-turning read. Highly recommended. ENJOY!

When you live in St. Louis and share Ms. Viets's fascination with the South Side, naturally you are immeditely drawn to her Francesca Vierling novels. But just as I started thinking all of her books would be uniform, along came the pleasant surprise of Doc-in-the-Box. This book is great entertainment, and manages to make a statement about American health care at the same time. Anyone who has been through an illness or has helped someone through it will definitely see themselves here. She has such a grasp on that, and of course on St. Louis, and I am always expecting to run into Francesca at Hampton Village.

What a delightful read. I don't fancy myself a huge mystery fan. But, this book is a cleverly written, highly entertaining look at a pretty serious subject... medical malpractice and inattention to the terminally ill. Viets makes you feel right at home where SHE is obviously most at home... in St. Louis. I couldn't put this book down. Viets weaves a compelling plot that takes you down tangents... just to get you thinking. I thoroughly enjoyed Doc in the Box and can't wait to read the others in the series.

I really hated this book! Everthing was lighter than air- the characters, the writing, the plot. It was a total waste of my time.

Columnist reporter Francesca Vierling makes her third appearance in THE PINK FLAMINGO MURDERS. Most readers can sympathize with Francesca, who is chronically unable to control her temper and tongue. Consequently, she finds herself in hot water both at work and in her personal life.

Always looking for a good story, Francesca starts covering her own neighborhood when less than desirable characters start dying after arguing with wealthy real estate owner Caroline. As the body count starts climbing, and all are murder victims, Francesca is positive Caroline is the killer and tries to find enough proof for the police. When Caroline herself is killed, Francesca is stumped--but then, so are the police.

Viets provides the reader with an intimate look at St. Louis, especially the proud old houses suffering from neglect and in need of "rehabbing". She also provides the reader with an up-close and personal view of a reporter's daily life, but I hope this isn't how a typical newspaper is run. Francesca's boyfriend Lyle can't understand why Francesca doesn't quit, as she and the other reporters are treated extremely poorly and aren't allowed to write any real news stories. I don't think Francesca herself knows why she stays and takes the daily punishment dished out by managing editor Charlie.

I was able to figure out the killer's identity early on. In spite of that, the book held my interest all the way to the end, mostly due to the interesting characters.

No one has her finger on the pulse of St. Louis more than Elaine Viets. Her descriptions of St. Louis and its charm and its people--and its quirks--are dead-on. Just when you think there are no new ways to commit murder, Viets shows us there is always a new idea. She throws just enough hints at whom the murderer is to cast suspicion on everyone and lets the reader make his or her own guesses. The Francesca Vierling series is top notch, and this is the best yet. After 200 pages I hated this book...because I knew I was approaching the end. I'm counting the days until the next book is released.

There are a lot of plusses to this book: great sense of place; some very clever wordplay; an engaging, imperfect heroine; an intriguing storyline. Unfortunately, problems with pacing and structure detracted me from being able to lose myself in BACKSTAB as much as I might otherwise have done, or to give it an unqualified recommendation.

Using conversation to convey information to the reader is certainly a viable storytelling device; having characters talking at great length about things one or both already knows, however, can come off sounding contrived. Ms. Viets uses this device quite a bit, unfortunately to the exclusion of more actual real-time scenes, where we get to see characters in conflict with each other. In other words, there's a lot of chit-chat, and not a whole lot of action, which strains the pacing. I was also aware of a lot of repetition -- the same information kept being served up in different ways -- which became tedious after a while. And her habit of telling us what had happened, then backtracking and filling us in on what led up to the event, was, at times, disconcerting. I, too, figured out the killer much too easily, in part because there weren't sufficient red herrings to keep me off-balance. And when the reader figures out whodunit before the protagonist does, that tends to make the protagonist seem a bit dull-witted, which Francesca certainly isn't.

Granted, many of the aspects of the book which bothered me won't even faze other readers. And I certainly liked what I read well enough to try another one of her books. I had just hoped for something a bit more focused.

This is the secone Elaine Viets mystery I've read (Rubout was the first) and I've enjoyed them both. She's great at establishing a sense of place, and since that place is my hometown of St. Louis, I was especially drawn into the story. There were a couple flaws, though: Why does the heroine wonder if a guy stabbed in the back was murdered? Obviously he was murdered, since I can't imagine anyone committing suicide by stabbing themselves in the back. The book's editor needed to clarify that the heroine, Francesca, thought the victim hadn't been killed in a routine robbery. But that's not the only editor's mistake I've seen in all sorts of books -- not by a long shot! Anyway, if you enjoy savvy women detectives, funny writing, and plenty of atmosphere, you won't be disappointed by Backstab.

Francesca Vierling is a columnist for the St. Louis City Gazette; at six feet tall and with a love for the truth, she is a striking figure. It's winter, and absolutely nothing is what it seems.

Two of Francesca's friends - Burt, an old man who was the victim of what was supposedly a robbery gone wrong, and Ralph, a gay house remodeler who suffered from an asthma attack, after supposedly forgetting to keep an inhaler nearby - died, and that police are not convinced that these deaths were related, or that Ralph was even murdered.

However, Francesca thinks they are... and goes out of her way to prove it. This book is larger than life, while still being realistic; included are a transvestite beauty contest, a bunch of editors who may or may not be the conservative types they pose as, and a killer who is definitely not what the reader will expect.

The main problem I have with this book is the similarity to the author, which is usually a crime punishable of bad reviews. However, the force of such likeable, diverse characters and situations really make this book worth the search... even if you do have to pay ungodly amounts of money for it.