Book Report: Dead in the Wool

Today, I'm going to hijack my own blog to give a book report. For my report, I read Died in the Wool by Mary Kruger, which I bought on-line. I picked it specifically because there's a "Pattern Inside Just for You". Kristine warned me that the patterns from knitting mysteries are riddled with errata. Nonetheless, I was excited. I love murder mysteries, I love knitting and I love free patterns... where's the problem?

When I received the book, there was no inserts or pull-outs, so I reasoned that it may be part of the story. Well, that's kind of fun. So, I set to reading it. As Murder-She-Wrote meets Elizabeth Zimmerman goes, the book was enjoyable! The writing style was pretty mediocre, as is often the case with cheesy murder mysteries. But, it was entertaining enough that you'll suffer through the repetitive and stilted dialogue, as you make your way to finding out just whodunnit.

Alas, as the pages were dwindling, there was no sign of my purchase-prompting pattern. I leafed through the remainder of book and didn't see any pages that looked like a pattern. I thought that maybe it had been lost at the warehouse. In my haste (and procrastination), I wrote a scathing customer review, which I have since edited.

Why the rewrite? The pattern had not been lost. What I had originally perceived to be the last chapter was actually the first chapter of the next book, and the "patterns", all three of which fit on a single page, were sandwiched between this and the final chapter. A flimsy "I'm not a knitting designer" disclaimer precedes the so-called patterns, proving that the author herself felt embarrassed about how lame these offerings were. To her credit, neither of the garter stitch fun fur scarves nor the garter stitch hanger cover had any of the errata of which Kristine had warned.

To say I was a little disappointed would be putting it mildly! Throughout the book, there were numerous descriptive references to a Norwegian Sweater. So many, in fact, that I was convinced that was the pattern we were going to get; maybe even hidden in segments throughout the narrative! It would have tied in nicely with the story, and been worthy of the "Look Inside for an Original Pattern Just for You" teaser on the back cover.

Bringing me to my next point. Fun-fur scarves are not "original" patterns! They are a dime a dozen, and they're not even patterns really. Cast on, knit until you get bored... ooh, can you repeat that?? It's a good bet that someone who is so new to knitting that they need instructions for a garter stitch fun fur scarf probably won't be drawn to a knitting mystery book in the first place!

Never mind! I have five more knitting mysteries to get through (some by different authors). Hopefully, there's a least one CO-worthy project to be found!