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Serious as a Heart Attack - Book Review |
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Book Reviews -
Women's Fiction
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Written by Jennifer Thompson
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 Serious as a Heart Attack , by Louisa Luna
What
happens when a recently fired alcoholic gets access to some easy money
and an opportunity to play private eye? Meet Queenie Sells, the
never-sober quasi-heroine of Louisa Luna's Serious as a Heart Attack.
Queenie loses her job at a calendar making company when she screws up
Daylight Savings Time. Drunk when she wakes up, drunk when she gets
canned, she never seems to find sobriety at any point thereafter.
Through a chance meeting with an acquaintance from high school, Queenie
gets the chance to make some easy money by searching for Trigger Happy,
a stripper and her friend's mistress. Queenie finds Trigger, but finds
her murdered on her bathroom floor, and gets herself wrapped up in the
mystery of what happened to Trigger as well as making herself a target
along the way.
At times funny on the surface, one can't help but wonder what this
story would read like if told from the point of view of someone sober
and looking on in Queenie's wasted life. Hopping from bar to bar and
drink to drink, Queenie isn't a little tipsy here and there. She is a
drunk, and it's a miracle she manages to stay alive at all as she plods
through her days and nights in New York, in search of Trigger's killer.
The plot (somewhat predictable) is secondary to the characters, and
Queenie is the main focus. The story is as much about her and her
plights as it is about solving the whodunit. It isn't pretty, it isn't
uplifting - it's edgy and raw, and definitely tragic if you can try to
get out of Queenie's head and see her life for what it really is.
From the dust jacket:
With danger closing in on her, Queenie can't help but realize the
precariousness of her own mortality. As she stares out of the window at
an old lady on the corner, she thinks, "There is nothing separating you
from that old lady right now -- maybe something, maybe time is all, but
that's really nothing when you think about it." After all, thinks
Queenie, it's just days. But unless she can find the killer before the
killer finds her, Queenie's days are seriously numbered.
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