One glance at the blurb for this book will give you a pretty good feel for the style. Yep, another comedic female private detective crashing through life in a manner that can make a reader cry with laughter, or stick their hands up in the air begging for a good old fashioned police procedural with a central female character with a serious drinking problem, an attitude and maybe a bad case of BO. Anything from the other end of the expectation spectrum anyway.

The difficulty with this sort of humorous crime fiction scenario is that humour is a profoundly subjective thing - more so than just about any other styling I can think of. It helps, of course, if the humour is combined with a good plot and a lot more to the central character than just that "lovable idiot" thing.

THE FIRST SHOT does show some glimpses of promise (and there are now further books in the series). Jennifer feels like she might not just be the same girl doing the same things, over and over and over again and there is a bit of a plot buried in the book, although it does stretch believability to breaking point at times. The humour is pretty heavy-handed and whilst it does toe the stereotypical line for these sort of girly, madcap rompy sorts of books, there were some parts that worked. Especially those aspects that had a personal touch to them, and were part of the set up of the character Jennifer for readers to get to know.

I understand why it is that people are writing these sorts of books, but goodness knows there are an awful lot of them around. Hopefully at some stage something sticks it's head above the crowd, particularly something that's quintessentially Australian, without being cloying or too cute about it all. THE FIRST SHOT is not exactly climbing to the top of that pile, but, it is a reasonable attempt, and could garner a readership who like their crime on the softer, sillier, funny side.

http://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/first-shot-patricia-kristensen ( )

From the first I was attracted by the author's refreshingly quirky sense of humour. I'm not really one for chick-lit or comedy-with-your-murder plots but Kristensen hits the nail on the head several times in the first few pages.

In the following Jennifer Shot is describing her mother's death after her father, an undercover cop, was killed by a Tasmanian biker, when his cover was blown:

My mother followed my father off the Derwent Bridge three months later. It was not an act motivated by overwhelming grief at my father's death, but by my mother's need to always be right. While driving on the bridge, my mother saw people waving and yelling that the bridge was down. As she had crossed it earlier in the day, she saw no reason why it should not be there on the way back.

The combination of a big ship and a drunken captain had not fared well for the big structure. The centre of the bridge was torn out, leaving a gaping hole that then claimed the lives of sixty-three people. They drove their cars off the centre of the bridge, plunging into the Derwent River and to their death. My mother was the last to make the fall.

The passage helps put a time frame on Jennifer's life. Jennifer was thirteen at the time she was orphaned.

The plot strained the bounds of credibility a bit too much for my liking, narrative passages at times read like they had been lifted from a travelogue (but then Tasmania is a bit out of the way for your typical crime fiction reader, and there's a lot that needs explaining), but there were redeeming features among some of the quirky characters, and I'm sure this author will have a following. ( )