Rose Gardner Mystery Tour

        I'm just so excited to participate in this tour!  Any book cover with a dog captures my attention immediately! I just love'em....as you can probably tell from my template.  I was delighted to learn that Muffy plays a significant role in both Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes and Twenty-Nine and a Half Reasons, both books by the talented Denise Grover Swank who if you've never heard of her has a writing style similar to Gemma Halliday.

     Stay tuned below for a special giveaway but first, let me introduce the book that started it all and then we will continue on to the reason behind this tour;

Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes
Denise Grover Swank
March 19, 2012
Bk. 1 in the Rose Gardner Mystery Series





For Rose Gardner, working at the DMV on a Friday afternoon is bad even before she sees a vision of herself dead. She's had plenty of visions, usually boring ones like someone's toilet's overflowed, but she's never seen one of herself before. When her overbearing momma winds up murdered on her sofa instead, two things are certain: There isn't enough hydrogen peroxide in the state of Arkansas to get that stain out, and Rose is the prime suspect.

Rose realizes she's wasted twenty-four years of living and makes a list on the back of a Wal-Mart receipt: twenty-eight things she wants to accomplish before her vision comes true. She's well on her way with the help of her next door neighbor Joe, who has no trouble teaching Rose the rules of drinking, but won't help with number fifteen-- do more with a man. Joe's new to town, but it doesn't take a vision for Rose to realize he's got plenty secrets of his own. 

Somebody thinks Rose has something they want and they'll do anything to get it. Her house is broken into, someone else she knows is murdered, and suddenly, dying a virgin in the Fenton County jail isn't her biggest worry after all.

My Take

From the start I loved this book, the writing style is so popular with me.  Twenty-Eight and a half Wishes was full of snappy dialogue and hilarity with Rose’s Neighbor Miss Mildred chiming in her two cents, Rose herself having sudden visions and no filter on her mouth.  I also liked the subplot of her sister Violet and husband Mike which has more substance in book 2.

                Although I never understood what the half wish was.

                Without giving away too much, Rose has to fight for her life throughout the book in order not to go to jail for killing her own momma.  Sure, they had their differences just like any other mother daughter relationship but her momma took it to the next level and had Rose basically as a slave and not as a true daughter.

                Joe steps in after the murder and tries to help Rose find out who the real murderer is but Rose soon comes to find out her new boyfriend has his own suspicions on who killed her momma.  How can she love a guy who thinks the worst of her?  Add to that, her older sister Violet seems to have taken on the mother role when Rose starts to crawl out of her shell and starts living life.

                Can things get any worse for Rose Gardner and her newfound dog Muffy?    

                I read this book in Twenty-four hours straight; I could not put it down.  The antics that Rose gets up to will have you laughing.  The drama she gets pulled into will have you cheering her on, and the love she finds will have you wishing for your own undercover cop/protector to cuddle up with at night.

And now for Twenty-Nine and a half Reasons....

Twenty-Nine and a Half Reasons
Denise Grover Swank

Bramagioia Enterprises

June 26, 2012

Bk 2 of the Rose Gardner Mystery series

When Rose reports for Fenton County jury duty she figures she’s lucky to get out of a morning working at the DMV. Instead, despite a disastrous encounter with the new assistant district attorney, Mason Deveraux, she’s picked as a juror on a murder case.  As the trial progresses, she realizes an ominous vision she had in the men’s restroom proves the defendant is innocent. And there’s not a cotton picking thing she can do about it.Or is there?
As if things weren’t bad enough, Rose’s older sister Violet is going through a mid-life crisis. Violet insists that Rose stop seeing her sexy new boyfriend, Arkansas state detective Joe Simmons, and date other men. Rose is done letting people boss her around, but she can’t commit to Joe either. Still, Rose isn’t about to let the best thing in her life slip away.

 My Take

                To me, Twenty-Nine and a Half Reasons was somewhat of a better book than the first one.  Granted, when I first finished reading Twenty-Nine I said to myself that the first one was better but after some thought I realized that each book is great in its own way. 

                I loved Twenty-Nine and a Half Reasons because of the love triangle that Rose has to deal with.  Ok, so it’s not really a love triangle but we get to meet Mason Deveraux, a crabby, assistant DA that’s working on the case that Rose just happens to be a juror for. You can tell Mason is starting to more than like her and you can see Rose care about Mason a little, but then that’s when Joe, the boyfriend says he loves her more than life itself and wants her to move to Little Rock.  At the same time, her older sister Violet is having what looks like a mid life crisis and breaks up with her husband. Rose is torn between Joe and Violet since Violet thinks she is settling for the first man she has had a relationship with.

                While Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes deals with Rose’s momma’s murder, Twenty-Nine and a Half Reasons has Rose trying to get an innocent man off trial for a murder he didn’t commit.  

The next book Thirty and a Half Excuses is sure to deal more in depth with Violet and Mike as well as what’s happening between Mason, Rose, and Joe.  I can’t wait.

You can catch Denise Grover Swank at her website: www.denisegroverswank.com