4-STAR REVIEW: MONDAY MORNING BLUES by Joanna Campbell Slan

Friday Night Mystery Club Series: Book 2
Publication Date: March 28, 2022

Being a divorced career woman in the late 80s isn’t easy. Cragan Collins finds the friendship of other working singles invaluable, especially as she learns the ropes of selling. When Cragan finds a saleswoman unconscious in the mall parking lot, she runs for help. But being a Good Samaritan means taking the blame when the other woman dies. Later Cragan learns the woman lied to her…repeatedly. Cragan is left wondering if she really knew her friend at all! Now a grieving Cragan sorts through her own feelings of disappointment while dodging accusations by the dead woman’s family. In the meantime, Cragan has attracted the interest of three attractive men. No wonder her head is spinning! To top it off, her friend’s killer thinks Cragan knows too much. The problems keep piling up. All Cragan needs is a kernel of truth, and she’ll figure out whodunnit.

It was nice to be back with the Friday Night Mystery Club in Decatur, Illinois. Monday Morning Blues is the second book in the Friday Night Mystery Club series by Joanna Campbell Slan, and it was nice to be back with characters we’ve met before but also many new ones. 

Management at The Gazette is as foul as ever, and Cragan and a few other workers are still trying to rise above it and do their jobs to the best of their ability. Of course, it’s hard when your boss is forever interfering with your work if not giving hard-won accounts away to others!

The story has many twists and turns, and once again, the Friday Night Mystery Club has a real mystery to solve. Clues are sprinkled throughout, and amateur sleuth Cragan is the first to start connecting the dots after her friend is murdered. But was she really a friend since there turned out to be so many secrets between them. 

Cragan doesn’t know who to trust anymore. She finds help through Ross, a new advertiser she recruited, and there’s a definite attraction between them as well. Between brainstorming with her friends in their mystery club, Ross’s knowledge and connections, and visits with her grandmother in a home, the puzzle pieces start falling into place.  

The relationships between Cragan and her friends who live in her building and make up the mystery club, along with her co-worker Winnie, were refreshing. They have each other’s backs and strong friendships. It was nice catching up with all of them. 

I liked how events from the first book in the series are woven throughout to bring us back up to speed on prior activities and how some of the storylines continued here. There is some romance woven along with secrets, anger, injuries, family and friends, workloads, food, and murder and mayhem. The story was often choppy and didn’t flow well between sections within a chapter. There is closure with solving the crimes but no happily ever afters so far.

Monday Morning Blues is a cozy mystery filled with clues, friendships, and more I look forward to reading Tuesday Trash and Trouble, the third book in the series.

Joanna is a New York Times Bestselling, USA Today Bestselling, and Amazon Bestselling author as well as a woman prone to frequent bursts of crafting frenzy, leaving her with burns from her hot glue gun and paint on her clothes. And the mess? Let’s not even go there.

Otherwise, Joanna’s a productive author with more than 80 written projects to her credit. Her non-fiction work includes how to books, a college textbook for public speakers, and books of personal essays (think Chicken Soup for the Soul).

Currently, she writes six fiction series: The Kiki Lowenstein Mystery Series (Agatha Award Finalist, contemporary, St. Louis setting, crafting), the Cara Mia Delgatto Mystery Series (contemporary, Florida setting, DIY, and recycling), the Jane Eyre Chronicles (Daphne du Maurier Award Winner, 1830s England, based on Charlotte Brontë’s classic), the Sherlock Holmes Fantasy Thrillers (late 1800s, based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s books), the Tai Chi Mystery Series (featuring a mature female amateur sleuth!) and the Friday Night Mystery Club (set in Decatur, IL in 1986 with a spunky female heroine.)

A former TV talk show host, college teacher, and public relations specialist, Joanna was one of the early Chicken Soup for the Soul contributors. She won a Silver Anvil for her work on the original FarmAid concert to benefit farmers.

In her ongoing quest never to see snow again, Joanna lives with her husband and their Havanese puppy, Jax, on an island off the coast of Florida.