Amy is becoming the Jessica Fletcher of the California writing community.

Carla Karolac is doing just fine. Having escaped the clutches of her controlling mother and founded a successful writing retreat in which participants are confined to windowless cells until they hit their daily word count, she lives a comfortable, if solitary, existence. If only her therapist, Toonie, would stop going on about Carla's nonexistent love life and start addressing her writer’s block, she might be able to make some progress. But then Carla finds Toonie murdered, and suddenly her unfinished memoir is the least of her concerns. Without quite knowing why, she dials an old phone number.

Amy Gallup, retired after decades as a writing instructor, is surprised to hear from her former student Carla out of the blue, three years since they last spoke. She’s even more shocked when she finds out the reason for Carla's call. Suddenly, she finds herself swept up in a murder investigation that soon brings her whole old writing group back together. But they’ll need all the help they can get, as one murder leads to another and suspicions of a serial killer mount across San Diego.

Full of Jincy Willett’s trademark dark humor, an unforgettable cast of characters, and two of the most endearingly imperfect protagonists who have ever attempted to solve a murder, Amy Among the Serial Killers shows us what can be gained when we begin to break down our own walls and let others inside…as long as they aren’t murderers.

I have been a Jincy Willett fan ever since I read her brilliant, scathing, hilarious book The Writing Class about an aging forgotten author quietly teaching creative writing to adult community college students when her writing class suddenly becomes a murder mystery. The Writing Class was a brilliant piece of writing in its own right, and Willett's facility in switching between writing styles to present excerpts from the students' work was one of the best parts of the book.

Apparently Willett grew to like her totally-not-a-self-insert protagonist Amy Gallup, because she wrote a sequel, Amy Falls Down, in which Amy, after getting a knock on the head, suddenly goes viral and gets her writing mojo back. And it was just as brilliant as the first book!

Now Amy's back for a third book. Amy Among the Serial Killers sees the return of several characters from the first and second book and is actually told from two POVs: Amy, and Carla Karolac, one of her original students in The Writing Class. Carla, a former child actor with a nightmarish stage mother, is now running a writer's retreat, when bodies start falling. When Amy gets involved, yup, it's another murder mystery, this time involving a serial killer even more sadistic than the one in the first book.

So, I liked this book. But... I didn't absolutely totally adore it like I did the previous two. I will absolutely keep reading Amy Gallup books as long as Jincy Willett keeps writing them. But this book seemed a little bit like a returning favorite protagonist forced into a reason for there to be another book involving her. Amy Gallup isn't quite Jessica Fletcher constantly stumbling into murder scenes, but Willett is going to have pull off something brilliant for the next book to be another murder.

Amy Among the Serial Killers is definitely still witty and clever and compellingly human. Amy remains her loveable, crotchety, observant self who cannot be flapped even when literally threatened with being dismembered. And there is more writing, and writing excerpts from various writers all believably written by the book's writer in the fictional writer's style. I love this kind of meta (a term which Willett would probably make fun of me for using). But I think the fact that she had to split the POV between Amy and Carla reinforces my suspicion that she wanted to write another Amy Gallup book but wasn't quite sure Amy could carry another book by herself. Also, I guessed the killer way sooner than I did in The Writing Class.

But this is still a great, funny, and well-written ('natch) book and I think Willett could probably write fifteen Amy Gallup books and I'd still like them.


Also by Jincy Willett: My reviews of The Writing Class, Amy Falls Down, and Winner of the National Book Award.

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My complete list of book reviews.