You've Got Five Pages, Doggone Deadly by Deborah Blake, to Tell Me You're Good.

The first chapter can make or break a reader's engagement with a story. We as writers must craft brilliant opening pages in order to hook those picky readers, so let's study the stories of others to see how they do it! Huzzah, a book without any prologues of any kind! This week I couldn't find any westerns, but I did try a type of mystery I've never read before: a pet-themed mystery. Doggone Deadly by Deborah Blake took me back to the kid mysteries like Nancy Drew, which felt nostalgic, but I also had some niggles I couldn't shake. We jump right into Chapter 1 with our protagonist hiding her friend from a snob who's throwing her weight around at a local dog show. The pacing between exposition and action is solid, and the setting is broken down in quick details readers can absorb as the scene moves along. This all works very well, especially considering I'm not in the first book of this mystery series.  Then come the characters. While the protagonist and best friend are easy to follow on the page, a third character is in the scene for conflict, and...oh, this snob is all unrealistic stereotype without any playful depth. I appreciate a writer's use of a few "loud" traits to make characters stand out in a big cast, but detail after detail emphasizes how rich this woman is, how much she hates shelter dogs, how little she cares about other people, and did we mention how rich she is? It's just way too much emphasis on a few traits, and it makes her act far more like a puppet for plot than a human being. If anything, it could have been far more interesting to see this snob play up the protagonist's shelter as if it were her goodwill move for the community so the snob could garner more praise and attention. Then the protagonist wouldn't know how to handle that saccharine sweetness hiding the snobbery from others, and more hijinks could ensue. But that's just my picky reading self talking. What will you, fellow creative, learn in the first five pages? Let's find out!