This is a corny-copia of corny jokes. Sorry, could not resist the silly pun. I guess the title should have given me a big glue. Never mind. Let us go to the storyline.
Emily Andrew does not want to share the hotel room with the scumbag Andrew Simon and suspects that someone confused the first name/ last name and thought they were a single family.
She is mortified with having to go late for dinner on the first day and segregated into a far away table next to the obnoxious Andrew. When he is found dead in front of his hotel room, discovered by Agnes to her consternation and hysteria, Nana and Emily are questioned by the police. All the time Nana wisecracks incessantly, which the author thinks provides an undercurrent of humour. Yes, but in an elementary, 1920s way.
When Andrew dies, the police investigate and Emily becomes the tour coordinator in his place. Dick loses his toupee in the river and Emily splashes into retrieve it, taking her new job seriously.
You wonder what the hell is going on? No word of the corpse or anything, just telling now all bad things happen to Emily constantly. An attractive cop tells her that Andrew was probably murdered and finally the story moves an inch.
Then her suitcase is lost and more blather follows. The story moves an inch when you find that Andrew was poisoned and when Shirley was found dead on the rocks overhanging a cliff. But takes a nap thereafter for a while, all the while filling the pages with painful puns and how everything goes wrong with the narrator Emily while not dealing with the flirting between her and the Swiss inspector who is investigating the case.
In the meanwhile, like any good detective story, everyone on the tour had had a problem with Andy. Dick Stolee’s wife because Andy refused to renew the lease for her dancing school and her relocation to a shady area causing an accident that ended her career. His wife cheating on Andy with another man who was in the tour… all kinds of things.
It is very funny when Dick Rasmusson dies of heart attack in Germany – to which they had gone on a day tour – and the group decides that he had to die in Switzerland because the procedure is easy. In the slapstick comedy movie style, they transport the body in a golf cart, propped up and with a hat and sunglasses, even making his dead hand ‘wave’ to colleagues who addressed him. Very obvious comedy but still cute.
But the banter gets a bit too much. When the eventually revealed killer and Emily stand there, while the former is trying to kill Emily, discussing mundane stuff and trading bad jokes, you want to throw the book across the room.
Ending is abrupt. How they found out about the killer is never revealed. The killer describes his entire plan to Emily in the style of James Bond villains.
If you like corny jokes strung together in the form of a story, this is not too bad.
3/ 10
— Krishna
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