Larger Than Death: A Novel [Hardcover]

SPECIFIC: I enjoyed the characters and the presentation of them. The storyline was easy to follow and enjoyable. The "who-dunit" wasn't easily detectible, but surprising. The author did manage to keep my interest with other goodies once it was discovered.

Ok, so the author is a large size woman who is happy with herself and has chosen to write characters she identifies with. Here is the problem; every fat woman in the book is described as being incredibly sexy, desirable to every man she meets, well adjusted, successful, etc., while the slender or average size women are all described as flawed, colorless, miserable, and in one case, homicidal characters. We have the fat heroine lusting after the boyfriend of her dead fat friend, just days after the death, and of course he instantly desires the heroine as well. Tacky, to say the least. All the men in the book, from the lawyer reading the will of the dead woman to the weird, third person speaking computer programmer nerd and including the millionaire owner of a weight loss chain with a beautiful, slender blond girlfriend, are depicted as lusting after our heroine or another fat woman. The only exceptions are the gay men, for obvious reasons. The message is clearly, "Fat women are sexier, more desirable and more together than thin women. Thin women are unhappy, warped and undesirable."

I have nothing against large size women, nor am I personally thin. Be happy with who you are and want to be if that is your choice. But when I buy a mystery, I expect to read a good mystery, not be lectured to on how wonderful it is to be fat and how pathetic and warped thin people are under the guise of a novel. It's obnoxious, tedious and annoying, which removes all the joy and interest in reading this book. The entire premise of this book is ludicrous and unbelievable, plus insulting to the average size population reading it.

The problem with this book is not that it's heroine weighs over 200 pounds. The problem is that reading it FEELS like reading a book with an agenda, rather than reading a book with a great mystery plot and an interesting heroine. The author is simply too heavy-handed with the message--slim people are depicted as starving, unhappy, and unfailingly rude.

On top of that, Jo's instant (mutual) attraction to her dead friend's lover was repellent to me. You know the old saying about the body not being cold yet? The connection I felt to Jo, with all her wit and charisma, was severed when she gave in to this attraction. And unfortunately, that connection was never regained.