Review: How to Have a Killer Time in D.C. by Sam Lumley

How to Have a Killer Time in D.C. (Oliver Popp’s Travel Guides to Murder #1)
by Sam Lumley

My Rating: 3 stars

Genre: Cozy Mystery
Age Category: Adult
Type of romance: m/m

Blurb:
A young, gay, autistic travel writer takes a head-spinning detour when murder and romance unbalance his well-planned life and career in this fun, quirky debut mystery . . .

For twenty-four-year-old Oliver Popp, autism is just another fact of life. As long as Oliver sticks to a comfortable itinerary planned well in advance, he gets by just fine as a staff writer for Offbeat Traveler magazine. But a curveball drops into Oliver’s budding career when his first feature assignment takes him to Washington, DC, to chronicle the latest tourism trends.

His freelance project photographer is Ricky Warner, a gregarious and impulsively adorable shot of adrenaline. If the flirty gay photographer isn’t enough to unbalance shy Oliver at the get-go, there’s also an unsettling chance encounter with old acquaintance, Elise Perkins, and a congressional hearing that’s shaking up both the capitol and an entrepreneurial billionaire. The unexpected distractions soon collide—quite literally—when Elise is struck dead by a speeding car. Funny how she didn’t move and didn’t scream. She just stared it down like she knew it was coming. Forget the National Mall and Mt. Vernon Square. Oliver and Ricky are game for something much more interesting: solving a mystery and a murder.

With their focus shifted and a deadline coming, they only have a few days to solve the crime. For Oliver, it’s a weeks of firsts: first crush, first time without a schedule, first time playing amateur sleuth, and first time getting wrestled out of his comfort zone. But with a loosey-goosey new partner like Ricky, that might not be such a bad thing at all.

My Review

I received a free copy from the publisher through Netgalley and voluntarily reviewed it.

How to Have a Killer Time in D.C. immediately caught my eye when I spotted it in Netgalley and when I discovered the main character was gay and autistic, I was even more excited as those aren’t things you see very often in cozies. And I am autistic myself and like reading about autistic characters. I have to say I started this book with quite high expectations and sadly this book just wasn’t fully for me and it made me sad as I really wanted to enjoy this book.

Something about the writing style didn’t quite work for me, add in some wrong expectations and parts that didn’t quite work for me and I was almost ready to DNF it and am not quite sure that wouldn’t have been better. There were parts I enjoyed and others I struggled with, so I ended up having very mixed feelings about this book.

I think I went into this book with the wrong expectations. I was thinking there would be a lot of traveling around the city for the article Oliver is writing, I wanted to see the city come to live and experience it that way. And I was looking forward to reading about an autistic main character and how that would impact things.

The travel aspect is mostly the backdrop and set up for the story, but the book focuses more on the mystery and romance. Which is fine, but not what I expected, the travel bits seemed to flew by and the city and places they visited didn’t really come alive for me. Even Oliver and Ricky didn’t really seem to have much motivation for the travel bits when they could be solving a murder.

Then there is Oliver being autistic and I think the representation is decently done, it just felt like less part of the story than I had expected. There are some scenes were Oliver being autistic really was obvious, but other parts less so. He seemed to handle things better than I expected with all the stress of what’s going on and only some autistic traits really come through, again that’s fine, I just expected that to be a bigger part of the book. I also thought Oliver was quite easily pulled away from his original plans to solve the mystery by Ricky and I just would’ve liked a bit more about him taking care of himself and standing up for what he wanted. Then again he didn’t seem to mind the change in plans too much and liked going along with Ricky.

The mystery part of the story I actually quite enjoyed. I wasn’t quite sure I would at first especially with the mystery being slow to start with the murder only happening around 20-25% I think it was. There also is this whole thing with self driving cars involved, which felt a bit off and like a weird jab at a current company at first, but I enjoyed the unique situation it added to the mystery later on. It certainly felt like a very modern murder mystery. There are some interesting twists and turns and I really liked the reveal at the end. I don’t think that reveal would be easy to predict, but I like how despite that I think you could still guess who the murderer is. I didn’t manage to predict the murderer, but I did think it made sense and there are some nice clues pointing in that direction when I looked back.

There were a few small things about the mystery and how it was handled that bothered me, but that was mostly related to how the characters got about investigating at times. There is a scene were Oliver uses someone’s interest in him against that person and that whole scene made me feel very uncomfortable, both for Oliver and the other guy. It felt very icky for both of them and wished they had found another way to get what they needed. Then there is an ex of Ricky who they keep bothering multiple times, which also just didn’t feel right to me with how those interactions were handled.

Despite my issues with some of the characters behaviors I did mostly like both Oliver and Ricky. I also thought their connection was clear, but the romance does follow a very pronounced back and forth pattern, which felt a bit much on top of the mystery. They would grow closer and have these nice sweet scenes and then decide to be friends again or something happened that put some friction between them. It just felt the whole book was like that. It has a bit of a happy for now ending with it not being fully clear what the future looks like romance wise. I assume in future books that will change.

To summarize: I really wanted to like this book, but struggled with it a bit. There is less about the traveling than I had expected and the travel scenes that are there weren’t really interesting, the city didn’t come alive for me. I would’ve liked more about Oliver being autistic as that was one of the reasons I picked up this book, but the parts that dealt with him being autistic did feel well written, there just wasn’t as much of it as I had expected. I mostly liked the characters, except for some of their behaviors when investigating the murder and how they treated some side characters. The romance has a very pronounced back and forth swing with them getting closer and then something pulling them apart. I liked them together, but didn’t care for the whole push and pull vibes. The mystery was quite good and I liked how that played out. There is an interesting reveal at the end and while I didn’t guess the murderer, I could see some clues when looking back. I am sad I didn’t enjoy this book more, but if you want a modern mystery featuring electric self-driving cars with a gay couple in it, you might enjoy this one.

Links:
– Goodreads
– Bookbub
– Amazon
– B&N
– Kobo

You can also read my review on Goodreads and Bookbub.