conuly

Stork Raving Mad.

I'm not really spoiling (spoilering?) much if I say that only a few chapters in and Meg has discovered a dead unpleasant person in her house. Same old, same old. The series is far enough in that she's not going to be a suspect, even though she stumbled across the body in her own home. They already covered the "Oh-my-isn't-it-suspicious-about-the-bodies" thing several books ago, didn't they? Every mystery series eventually has to pass this hurdle, and then the cops stop being suspicious forever after (especially if one of them is the heroine's boyfriend, naturally). They've acknowledged that the whole premise is silly and it will never come up again. Got it.

But thinking logically, if these characters knew they were in a book series - wow, what an opportunity! What I really want to see one day is a book, several books in of course, where the housewife/teacher/mom/librarian/blacksmith (that's Meg!) snaps and just goes on a rampage and kills everybody who gets in her way, safe and secure in the knowledge that she'll never be caught because, duh, she's the heroine!

And then she can be caught and go on to solve (or unsolve, when it's a wrongful conviction) crimes in prison. Or can NOT be caught, very Roger Ackroyd (am I allowed to reference books I haven't read? I'm going to anyway), that doesn't matter. It'd be something different, anyway.

But no. None of these people ever realizes the potential of their... interesting predicament.