Armed and Outrageous: An Agnes Barton Mystery

Title: Armed and Outrageous (Agnes Barton Mystery Book 1)Author: Madison JohnsPublisher: Outrageous BooksKindle Edition Published: 4-29-2012Pages: 262Agnes Barton, a young 72 year old senior citizen greets life had on with an attitude. She stumbles from the bed and promptly knocks her false teeth off the nightstand and under the bed. Retrieving them and placing the back into the denture cup and heads to the shower trying not to trip over her cat Dutchess. She wears Victoria Secret garments and vivid colors, drives a red mustang and sports a rose tattoo on her shoulder. No demure Grandma here.Eleanor Mason, 82, Agnes' best friend and quite a gossip leaves her a message informing her another woman has disappeared without a trace. Agnes drives to Roy Robinson's local Bait and Tackle shop to purchase a paper. The odious Roy makes a parting offensive suggestion ensuring he will never be one of your favorite characters. As Agnes reads the new article she remembers another young woman's disappearance. Someone who was not a stranger, but rather someone dear to her heart, her granddaughter, Sophie vanished while out jogging one day while visiting her grandmother the year before.When her husband Tom, a State Trooper, died 30 years earlier of a heart attack, Agnes needed a job to support herself and help put her two children through college. The job market for women was so poor that Agnes began her own business. Cleaning the homes of others. No one notice what they said or did around her and she gathered information like a sponge. Then she went to work for the attorney Andrew Hart. Hart hired Agnes to gather information for him Agnes. She learned her detective skills from gathering the information for her friend and employer. Putting that skill to use Agnes has been looking at every disappearance as a stepping stone to finding out what happened to her granddaughter.Checking out the area where the latest woman disappeared Agnes and Eleanor discover blood on the grass and an athletic shoe with a chain and the missing woman's initials hanging from it. Calling the sheriff she is told to back off and that the law will handle it. Considering that they will not even consider something could have happened to the woman yet Agnes tells him to forget it and that she will be investigating herself.Following a hunch Agnes and Eleanor travel down a dirt path, barely wide enough for the car to travel down, they find a cabin and three young people. Asking some questions they find out that Jennifer Martin, the missing woman had been staying at the cabin and had gone off to the Quick Stop and never returned. When asked if Jennifer left anything there, one of the boys gives Agnes her backpack. Arriving back to Eleanor's home the check out the items in the backpack and discover the girl really did have a severe heart condition that required medication which she left behind and a red velvet box that held an item that surprised them.Next they make plans to interview the girls father who is staying at the only inn in town. An inn that is supposedly haunted by the family that was murdered there back in 1968. In fact the father is staying in the just renovated room the mother had been killed in. When she enters the dining room and spies William Martin and approaches him to question him about his daughter's disappearance. She dumbfounded to find her former boss and romantic interest Andrew Hart is there with William Martin. Offended by some of the questions Agnes asked Martin goes to the police and reports Agnes.Believe me if you had a Grandmother like Agnes or Eleanor you would never have a boring life. I hope I can grow up to be just like them. You will laugh so much at their antics even as you follow them as they ignore the law's orders to back off. They do what anyone would do for family. They go where angels far to tread to trace down every clue no matter where it leads. From the dark woods to the sex store hidden in the back of bikini shop, with a stop for Eleanor to indulge in an ice cream brawl with her favorite nemesis. They go toe to toe with anyone necessary to find out what happened to Jennifer in the hopes of finding answers to what happened to Sophie the year before and the three other women they know of in between. Hold your breath because you are in for a wild ride, but I promise you will enjoy every minute of it. Be warned there are a few words sparingly used that might offend some, but they are few and far between. When your finished be sure to pick up book 2, Grandmas, Guns and Ghosts.

I felt that the mystery itself was well-thought out. I had few issues with grammar, punctuation, or spelling (although there were a few issues there). What I objected to was the characteristics attributed to the elderly. The author claims in her foreword that she has worked with the elderly for years and assures the reader that the elderly truly can behave this way (adding the caveat that the exaggerated some behavior because she wanted her characters to be "over the top').I can accept that. She wants her characters to be modern and sexually active (something that many younger readers may have difficulty accepting). She wants her characters to be wild and "cool" (like pot smoking and drinking). She wants them to be badasses (with the fighting and gunplay).I'm OK with all of that.What bothered me was the stereotyping. The SERIOUSLY INACCURATE stereotyping. The main character keeps her teeth in a class of efferdent. She has dentures at 72, which isn't uncommon, but it isn't the norm nowadays, either. With my grandmother's generation (the generation that would have been Agnes Barton's PARENTS' generation, this was the norm. But Agnes's generation is that of the Baby Boomers. I have several people in my life of this age group. I have 9 people in my life who I know closely enough to know their medical and social history (I will call them my "sample" for the purposes of this review). My sample consists of 5 women and 4 men. Their ages range from 65-75. Four members of this sample are couples (2 of the men married to 2 of the women). Two of the remaining women are not currently married (either widowed or divorced). The remaining woman and remaining two men are married to people outside of the sample (for whom I don't know these statistics)ALL of the members of the sample still have their own natural teeth. Only one of them has any dentures, and that's a partial plate from when she was in an accident as a teenager.She talks about how MOST of the seniors in this retirement community want to be in bed by 9 pm every night. Of the nine people in my sample group, only 2 of them like to be in bed by this time. Those two are a married couple. The other 7 in this group go to bed at various times AFTER 9 pm.The author portrays sex at this age as somewhat of a rarity. The main character acts like no one would ever want to have sex with her again at the age of 72. Her best friend is 80, and will basically take whatever she can get in the sex department, because it's so rare to find. Of my sample, 7 of the members are currently sexually active. The other two are abstinent by choice, as neither is currently interested in joining the dating pool.The author portrays seniors as being bad drivers. This is spoken of specifically about one character. I can live with that part, because maybe Eleanor is just a bad driver. And Aggie blames it on her age. OK, I can handle that. But later, Agnes pulls into a parking lot, and proceeds to tell the reader that every car in the parking lot was dinged and dented because most of the drivers in this retirement are senior citizens. THIS was the part to which I took the most offence. Evidently, other readers had similar qualms. Additionally, our main character actually drunk drives home from a party.Firstly, a study just came out this last week that showed that seniors have a much LOWER incidence of accidents than younger drivers (including the age 26-45s). Of my representative sample, two members are aggressive drivers, two are frequent dent and dingers, and THE OTHER FIVE are excellent drivers. One of them has never had a ticket, in over 50 years of driving, and has only had one accident (when a deer hit her car - I specifically say that the deer hit her car, because the damage was all to the windshield and roof, because the deer jumped on top of the car, it never contacted the bumper). 2 of these drivers had issues with driving under the influence, but it was when they were younger, and none of them has driven under the influence in over 20 years. 7 of these group members have not had an accident in over a decade. The other two are (of course) our frequent dent and dingers.The author also portrays gatherings with these characters (like their monthly card night) as a time for comparing battle scars. Everyone is talking about their aches and pains. Bowel movements and their frequency are considered normal discussion for characters of this age (the main character actually says that they talk about this EVERY month when the get together). In my sample, the only real discussion of aches an pains that I've seen occurs when someone has recently had some sort of major illness or procedure (example: chemotherapy heart bypass). I've never heard any of them sitting around talking about bowel movements. And their discussion of medical issues seems no more or less intense than people of my age (30s & 40s). I, myself, had a major surgery about 3 years ago, and afterwards everyone constantly asked me for medical updates. After a while, it subsided. I see the seniors in my life discuss their health issues NO MORE AND NO LESS than other adults.There were some minor writing issues in the book, a few were distracting for the reader, but most were easily overlooked. It was the ridiculous stereotyping that I had an issue with.I was also bothered by how disrespectful anyone under the age of 30 was. It seemed like if you were under 30, you were a rude, disrespectful jerk. I have not found this to be the case in the real world either.

I am not quite sure how this book arrived on my Kindle. Having finished Hamnet for a book group, this title looked like it might be a fun vacation read. Agnes and company kept my interest, but I felt all along things would work out in the end. Call me Pollyanna. I give it four stars as I would recommend it because I do enjoy reading mysteries. This one had humor as well as suspense.

Seventy something Agnes and her older best friend, Eleanor, become embroiled in a mystery when a young female tourist is reported missing. Agnes's granddaughter disappeared without a trace just a year before and Agnes has never given up hope of finding her. Sadly, I found it impossible to relate to the characters, mainly because for me, their behaviour was more than outrageous. All of the many elderly characters took a pride in behaving badly. They were rude, crude and at times, thoroughly unpleasant. I found the plot - young women disappearing in a small, close knit but isolated community - totally unconvincing. I really disliked the fact that, having met up with a past love, the way Agnes discovers that he cares for her is to spend the evening getting so drunk she doesn't remember falling into bed with him. Not romantic, no matter how old you are. I couldn't accept that armed thugs could roam around the area unchallenged and shoot up cars in supermarket car parks and outside people's houses without a pretty heavy response from the law enforcement agencies. I also couldn't accept that so many young women could just go missing without any proper response from the local sheriff's office. It simply didn't ring true.

This was hard work. A 'senior' who lives in a town where all the other 'seniors' fight and act like unsocialised teenagers. The seniors all have a 'senior' ailment thrown in to prove they are older. The disjointed story wanders through kidnapping, shootings, cold cases, fights, guns and a bit of sex in the background. It all resolves itself in the end with what, I expect is meant to be a climatic finish, but just seems silly. Any villain worth her/his salt would have shot Aggie without a second thought. Her friend who is so rude that it is not funny, just sad, would have been killed at the start of the book by one of the people she was insulting if it was real life. The incident of burning Aggies house down is also left hanging with no idea of where she and her cat now live. The basic idea could be good, but is chaos instead. I won't be reading any more.

OK, some of the negative reviews have a point. It's not that cosy, it has a few issues with plottings and editing, it isn't totally realistic and it employs broad humour and vulgarity.However, none of that is really important. It's still a class above most of the free crime books I get on Kindle.It kept me turning the pages, it made me laugh and it deals with age in a way which has definite echoes of reality even if it isn't strictly accurate.Miss Marple it isn't, but think of Stephanie Plum with forty more years on the clock and you will be about right.I'm not sure why it has attracted such criticism from reviewers but please don't let them put you off - it's not as violent, as faulty or as vulgar as some would have you believe and for a free book it's worth taking a risk. It is a definite cut above many cosies out there in terms of characterisation and humour and if those two are OK, a few minor imperfections aren't significant.

I never really got into this book. I didn't gel with any of the characters and wasn't fussed about the plot. Slightly put off by the coarseness but if it had been a good book that wouldn't have troubled me. I got bored and stopped reading about a third of the way through then looked at the last few pages, am glad I didn't read all the way through then.

I am usually a huge fan of the cosy mystery genre but, I have to admit, this one left me dissatisfied. It is the 1st book in a series about a couple of pensioners who have to solve a murder - but it became more obsessed with the love/sex lives of the aforementioned pensioners and less about the crime. Now, I don't think I am a prude, but there was too much information in this for me to count this as a truly cosy mystery. The characters were poorly drawn and the whole story was weak - I don't think I'll be reading any more of Agnes Barton and her exploits.