Review: Who Do, Voodoo? by Rochelle Staab
Liz Cooper is a clinical psychologist who doesn’t believe in the supernatural, which is inconvenient when her best friend Robin starts getting hexed dolls in the mail and one of Robin’s exes turns up dead with voodoo paraphernalia at the scene. Enter Nick Garfield, a religious studies professor who specializes in the occult, and the two of them start poking around L.A.’s voodoo community to clear Robin’s name.
I picked Who Do, Voodoo? up because the premise sounded like it had a little more meat than the average cupcake-shop cozy, and I was right. Rochelle Staab is doing something genuinely interesting by pairing a hardcore skeptic with a religious-studies guy who takes belief seriously without being credulous. The conversations between Liz and Nick about whether faith and skepticism can coexist are the best part of the book and I wish there had been more of them.
The mystery itself is fine. Cozy-fine. The clues are fairly distributed, the suspect pool is reasonable, and the killer’s identity isn’t the most shocking but isn’t telegraphed either. Where Staab does well is atmosphere; the L.A. setting is specific in a way most cozies aren’t. We’re not in a cute fictional New England town. We’re in actual Los Angeles, with traffic and Silver Lake and weirdos.
Where it stumbles: the romance between Liz and Nick is cued up like a microwave timer. They meet, the book tells us they have chemistry, and from there it’s a foregone conclusion. I wanted earning, not announcing. Robin, the friend in peril, also drifts in and out of the story in a way that makes the stakes feel mushy.
For who? Cozy readers ready for a smarter premise than usual. Fans of Ellery Adams or Joanne Fluke who want to branch into something a little less twee.
A solid series opener. I’ll pick up book two.