Note: Thank you to BookSirens, Jubilee Publishing, and author Bruce Hammack for the advanced reader copy of this book. This review will also be posted on BookSirens. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.

I had previously read one of the books in this series, and while I wasn’t dazzled by it, I thought it showed enough promise that I would give the series another shot when offered an advanced reader copy of Murder at the Monument. I think I was more disappointed with this one than I was with A Killer on Christmas Cay.

The series follows two unlikely detectives as they solve mysteries that come across their radar. In this case, there’s a body found at the monument at San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site. Steve Smiley is a former homicide detective who is now blind and has some mystical abilities after losing his sight that lets him know if a death was a murder. He is close friends with Heather McBlythe who was a lawyer before entering law enforcement. Now, she is another billionaire investment guru of some kind, just like her father. Steve has been antsy lately for a mystery to solve and he calls up a friend who is on the case of the death at San Jacinto. It turns out the victim was the son of a local Houston oil magnate. Steve tells him it wasn’t an accident or suicide, but murder.

Even though they haven’t been asked to investigate, Steve and Heather begin to dig into the victim’s background. Meanwhile, a man from Steve’s past seems to be back, threatening both Steve and Heather.

The first third of the book, at least, is bogged down with the characters’ social lives. Although the series reading order said that reading prior books was not necessary, I believe it is. There are so many characters here that seem to be carry-overs from earlier books that I was lost at how they were meaningful to events that are going on. I found it hard to care, as well, since they didn’t seem to be part of the mystery at all. I kept wanting them to just get to the mystery, but there was a lot of “catching up” with these characters as well as details of everyday life that I could do without.

The actual mytery, once it gets going, is pretty good. There was a lot of intrigue and many different directions for things to go. In the end, though, I had to force myself to finish the book to review it. The mystery just couldn’t hold me since I didn’t know the backbround that was important at some parts and there were too many unnecessary details that bogged the story down.

I think if you’ve read previous books in this series and you enjoyed those, you might like Murder at the Monument more than I did. Of the two books I’ve read in the series, I like A Killer on Christmas Cay better simply due to the fact that Steve and Heather were taken away from their usual stomping grounds which meant that everything else in the story was new as well and it didn’t feel like I was missing backstory. Here, I definitely felt that. I won’t be reading any other books in the series, though, as I just think it’s not up my alley.