I'm a huge fan of cozy mysteries but wow, this was just a complete miss for me. I'm still not sure if it was meant to be making fun of the genre or it really was just a really bad story.

Rory, a manager in a mega-petstore, comes to the town of Destiny to find out whether the superstition about bad luck from walking under ladders is true. Her boyfriend had walked under one and died shortly after. Yes, that is the premise. These type of mysteries are known for not having the deepest plots in literature but really? Whether or not you get bad luck from walking under a ladder is the premise? The town of Destiny makes it's living off being the superstition capital of the world. The tourist trade in people interested in superstitions is how all the town makes it's money. Every business in town centers around one superstition or another and it you are sick of the word "superstition" by now, you'll be pulling your hair out by the end of the book because it's used in almost every other sentence.

When Rory gets there she takes her dog Pluckie (the word "Pluckie" is another word that will have driven you out of your gourd by the end of the book)to a pet store which is full of, not surprisingly, superstition-based pet items. I bet you didn't know those existed. I sure didn't but I do now. But I digress. Rory and Pluckie find the owner of the store on the floor in the back room in some type of health emergency so they call an ambulance to get her to the hospital. From this point on, having done what any normal human would do, Rory and Pluckie are announced to be the luckiest things that ever walked the earth.

So now the owner of this pet store is in the hospital and asks Rory, an person she doesn't know from Adam, to manage her store for her while she's incapacitated. The next day there's a murder, Rory and Pluckie discover it, she does everything the police tell her not to, spends a lot of time mad at people when they've done nothing wrong, and discovers that pets are welcome everywhere in Destiny, even restaurants. Nothing about the plot makes sense to me. Why would you ask someone you've known 12 hours to take over your business, your sole livelihood? Why does everyone allow this absolute stranger to come into their town and act so arrogantly to them? Why does the public school system of Destiny teach superstition in their curriculum? These are the bigger mysteries to me than who killed whom. I seriously considered throwing my Kindle across the room several times and I love my Kindle. This story did not require suspension of disbelief. It required taking your brain out and leaving it on the table.

I received this book through Netgalley in return for an honest review.