Pet Peeve

Last night, in part of my downtime, I plowed through Rita Mae and Sneaky Pie Brown's latest paperback release, Sour Puss. I have read every Sneaky Pie Brown mystery — in fact, they were really the first and only mysteries I read. My mystery reading is selective and rare.

So why did I find myself annoyed as I read this book? For the same reason that the past two or three other Sneaky Pie Brown/Mrs Murphy mysteries have bugged me: there's simply way too much blatant 'product placement.' I don't need to know that Harry buys Woolverine boots over Timberland boots because Timberland has gone down the drain. There's a whole chapter on which SUV Ned should buy because he shouldn't be driving an Audi to the Virginia legislature. So someone pipes in with how good the Cadillac Escalade is. (That one will tout a SUV like that in the first place is a put-off.) And so it goes. There are many places where the name of the product could easily be dropped.

I am not sure I will boycott reading these mysteries but, frankly, the obvious selling-out is a real disappointment. It's one example of the sickness of our capitalist system — one can't even escape into a mystery without being bombarded by advertising.

Rant off.