Title: Ride or Dye
Series: Curl Up and Dye Mysteries: Book Six
Author: Aimee Nicole Walker
Publisher: Amazon/Kindle Unlimited
Length: 202 Pages
Category: Contemporary, Mystery/Suspense
At a Glance: If you are a fan of this series, and Josh and Gabe with all their snarkiness and shenanigans, you won’t want to miss this final installment.
Reviewed By: Lindsey
Blurb: Gabe and Josh Roman-Wyatt have been living life in the fast lane. Demanding jobs, precocious twin toddlers, an ever-growing circle of friends, and a menagerie of pets means their home is filled with love and laughter but very few quiet moments for the happy couple. Gabe’s solution is to plan a surprise vacation at a perfect hideaway where the two of them can slow things down and reconnect.
Tarlington House, a historic home located on Edisto Island in South Carolina, hosts an annual murder-mystery event which will allow Josh to use the skills he learned from his all-time favorite television detective to solve the case. The serene setting is perfect for fun days in the sun, passionate lovemaking under the stars, and a healthy wager between husbands to see who can plan the best date. But when the other guests arrive, the guys find themselves surrounded by liars and cheaters who will say or do anything to win, reminding them there’s no place like Blissville.
When a guest is killed during a vicious storm that knocks out the power and phone lines, Josh and Gabe’s murder mystery role-playing becomes a real-life whodunnit. Serve and protect will take on a deeper meaning for Gabe when he’s torn between upholding the law and protecting his husband from a ruthless killer.
Review: This was a bit hard for me to pick up, not because of anything bad; quite the opposite. When you know it is the last book in a series you have been invested in, there is something a little melancholic about bidding it farewell. As I have been reading Curl Up and Die Mysteries from the onset, as well as the spin-off, Road to Blissville, this was one of those situations for me. There has always been something about Josh and Gabe that just kept me invested. Gabe, for all his grumpiness; Josh, with his OCD ways and need to play matchmaker; the way the banter together and, of course, the birds. It’s been a joy watching them go from enemies to lovers to husbands, reading as they adopted children and began making their family unit, and overcoming their pasts to make a future together, plus a little mystery here and there to keep things from getting too boring.
If you are a fan of this series, and Josh and Gabe with all their snarkiness and shenanigans, you won’t want to miss this final installment. Gabe surprises Josh with a little vacation. Life was hectic between twin toddlers, crazy dang birds, friends popping out babies, work, friends’ breakdowns, and all the other stuff that tends to happen. While their marriage is strong, it is a way for the two of them to reconnect and just be for a little while, away from the daily stresses. What better way to do that than going to a place that is gorgeous, has interesting history and, best of all, includes a murder-mystery weekend. Of course, as it tends to do for these two, that murder-mystery stops being a game and turns deadly.
What is different about Curl Up and Dye Mysteries, at least for me, is while there is always a whodunnit, most of the time the mystery takes a backseat to the romantic portion. It’s there, but life doesn’t generally stop moving forward for these two and their group of friends. So yes, there is a murder and that dash of mystery that always makes its way in, but in this case the murder doesn’t take place until well past the halfway point. The majority of the book was the two seeing friends, being parents and doing parental things, wining and dining each other, romantic gestures, and getting to know their rather eclectic group of fellow murder-mystery attendees.
From the start it becomes clear the other attendees are playing roles, changing names and occupations. Josh and Gabe decide to switch it up a bit themselves, and Josh becomes excited about the rivalry of it all. He wants to scope out the competition, because he plans on winning the game when it is all said and done. Just for fun they decide to switch up their roles just a tad, too. During Josh and Gabe’s attempts to get to know the other players secrets, and pasts collide, it is clear there is some underlying tension between three of the other “couples”, and it plays out in quite interesting ways. The rest of the people there to play are unique and add a little mystery to what the heck was all happening, and who was who they said they were. I found myself enjoying trying to figure out what was real and not while Josh and Gabe did.
I’m a huge fun of savoring the mystery, putting pieces together, and the whole investigative side of a whodunnit. Unfortunately, in this instance, I didn’t really get to experience that here, which is what I would probably say is the biggest downside of this story for me. Since the murder itself happens pretty far into the book, there wasn’t a lot of time for investigation, and it was wrapped up too quickly. It was like I blinked and there was the discovery of the dead body, and then before I could really even immerse myself in theories, it was solved with very little time in between. I had all this backstory and threads that were shown from the other attendees, but Gabe and Josh did little in the way of actually solving the mystery and putting the pieces they learned to use. Then they were on the road home to what life held in store for them next. I feel that the murder was almost unnecessary in this case, and I would have been just as happy plugging along as they played the game and discovered the true identities or maybe the actual profession of their competition.
All in all, even with the let-down on the murder-mystery side, I was having a blast joining Josh and Gabe on their vacation adventures and observing the other attendees’ dramas play out. The epilogue left a happy place in my heart. I love a good HEA, and these two got theirs in spades. If you love this series, you will love this addition.
As I bid a fond farewell to this series, I know it’s not a forever goodbye to Gabe and Josh. Curl Up and Dye Mysteries may be over, but Blissville still has more to come. In fact, I am pretty sure Josh has his matchmaking sights set on a couple that I would not be at all surprised to see get their own story in the spin-off series, Road to Blissville, and it’s there where I can hopefully peek in on these two guys and their family from time to time.
You can buy Ride or Dye here:
[zilla_button url=”http://authl.it/B07H421NXR?d” style=”blue” size=”large” type=”round” target=”_blank”] Amazon/Kindle Unlimited [/zilla_button]