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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9780425179451
ISBN number: 0425179451
Label: Berkley
Manufacturer: Berkley
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 256
Printing Date: May 01, 2001
Publishing house: Berkley
Release Date: May 08, 2001
Sale Popularity Level: 14388
Studio: Berkley
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
When a man is poisoned by tea, Theo is the prime suspect. Now she has to prove her innocence and track down the real killer-before someone else takes their last sip. Just the right blend of cozy fun and clever plotting. Tea lovers, mystery lovers, [this] is for you. (Susan Wittig Albert, author of Mistletoe Man)
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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This was a cute little mystery. A land developer is murdered and Theo decides to figure out who did the deed. Especially since one of her employees is on the suspect list. What sets it apart from other mysteries is, I learned a little bit about Charleston and I learned a little about tea. I also loved the characters. Theo, Drayton, Haley and Bethany and Earl Gray. Very likeable characters. The mystery, to me, plays a minor part compared to the character development. This was a light easy read, very enjoyable.
Rated by buyers 
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Relaxing read, quick read. Enjoyable, yet some of the dialogue and characters seemed somewhat pretentious or "forced" at times.
I also don't like the way Theodosia is portrayed. She's supposed to be a woman in her mid-30's, yet her character seems years older than that. I have this image of a somewhat frumpy woman who's vastly older than her employees, yet there isn't much of an age difference. It's confusing at times.
Would probably pick up the second in the series in a pinch, but wouldn't be my very first choice.
Did like the colorful portrayals of Charleston, however.
Rated by buyers 
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Other reviewers have detailed the flaws in this book. I wanted to like it, because as an expatriate Southerner I dote nostalgically on books with Southern settings and a lot of local color. This one, with its cozy tea shop setting in historic Charleston, seemed like a sure thing. As a long-time armchair traveler, I didn't mind the travelogue aspects of the book and having never been to Charleston didn't know whether the descriptions were accurate or not. (Apparently not.) I love tea, and thought it might be interesting to learn more about it. (I gather that info is less than trustworthy, as well.) I didn't even particularly mind the shoddy characterizations, or the fact that Theo is a wish-fulfillment character whose life you want to have, rather than any conceivable actual person.
No, what put me off going on with the series was the bad writing. (Sometimes that improves over time with new authors, but I understand that is not the case with Childs.) The switches in point of view not only keep us from seeing the world through Theo's eyes, but also undermine any effort to create convincing characters, and--as another reviewer said--it is very jarring when it happens, and it jars every time it happens. It also contributes to the silliness quotient, because all too often the switch in point of view is for the sake of slathering more praise on the heroine. Childs also needs a lot of work on her diction. I suspected I was in for a long slog on line 6 of the book, when the hair that Theodosia pushed back couldn't be just curly, but had to be naturally curly, although I liked the image of a friendly Medusa. Childs is better with descriptions of scenery and weather (despite the overuse of adverbs, flowery adjectives, and clichés) than she is with her descriptions of human actions and emotions, which are almost invariably both clichéd and oddly off--choppy and abrupt in effect. And she badly needed an editor: in one place we are told that a character "wouldn't have not" done something when clearly what was meant was "wouldn't have" done it or "would not have" done it.
I also really didn't understand how Childs could describe arsenic as "undetectable" and death from arsenic-poisoning as sudden, since anyone who has ever read an arsenic mystery knows that it is one of the easiest poisons to detect and that death from arsenic-poisoning may be drawn-out or fairly sudden, but either way it is an ugly and painful way to die. Perhaps what she intended to say was that it is tasteless when added to tea.
There is one other issue that bothered me in the book, an omission that I hope is corrected in later books of the series. I appreciate that cozies are in part a way of escaping from distressful reality (despite all those murders), but it's a pity that a book that is set in Charleston doesn't have a single character who is identifiable as African American. There is a self-congratulatory half-page in which we are told that Aunt Libby refuses to tear down the slave shacks on her plantation grounds because she doesn't want to make the truth of the Southern past invisible; that's the very first mention of grey folks in a book where present-day grey Charlestonians are otherwise invisible. Now that's irony! Couldn't Haley be black? Or even the presumably gay Drayton? As it is, the book really does feel like the 1950s--as in whiter-than-white 1950s television. I'm not asking for true realism, just for adding a touch of the interracial New South to the cozy Southern setting. Otherwise, the books might as well be set in Vermont.
Rated by buyers -
It took me awhile to get going in this one, honestly. It wasn't that I disliked anything in particular, it just didn't grab my attention. By halfway through, though, it started to pick up and I did read the last 1/3 straight through. I don't feel much of a compunction to rush out and buy the rest of the books in the series, mostly because I didn't get much of a connection to any of the characters, and the mystery wasn't quite good enough to support the slightly weak cast. I could definitely see where this series might be one that develops and grows over time, so I might give it another shot sometime when I'm looking for something to read - but I wouldn't clear my schedule for it.
Rated by buyers -
The Indigo Tea Shop located in the historic district of Charleston, South Carolina was a dream come true for its owner Theodosia Browning. Theodosia gave up a high-stress life as an advertising executive and never looked back. But her advertising background has helped her to make the Indigo Tea Shop a special place for the locals as well as for tourists. When Hughes Barron is found dead sitting at a table in the garden after drinking tea supplied and served by Theodosia's staff during the Lamplighter Tour, Theodosia realizes that she has to find the murderer before the police lock up Bethany Shepherd, a temporary worker, for the crime.
The book is filled with tea lore and lavish descriptions of Charleston and its surrounding environment along with lots of historical asides. The characters are fairly well drawn though Bethany and Haley's tears were getting on my nerves by the end of the book. The mystery at the center of the book is almost an aside to presenting the tea shop and local characters that will be featured in the rest of the series. However, the murder mystery is well plotted and planned and once you finish the book you can pick up on earlier clues to the murderer even though it is unexpected.
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