When fifty year old Stella Hardesty ended her abusive marriage by bashing her good-for-nothing husband with a wrench, she didn't plan on making a career of teaching manners to wife beaters. Then "clients" – frightened, desperate women with no one else to turn to – started showing up on her doorstep, and Stella reluctantly finds herself in the business of reforming violent men.
Sometimes a stern word will do the trick, but more often than not, Stella needs to get physical to make her point. Her success rate is high. Most of her "parolees," as she calls them, would rather behave like gentlemen than risk losing any valuable parts of their anatomy.
But Stella's last case has gone about as far south as a case can go. Not only does Stella's parolee, Roy Dean, refuse to give up his violent ways, he's also the most likely suspect in the disappearance of his ex-girlfriend's eighteen month old son. Together Stella and the ex-girlfriend, Chrissy, scramble to connect the dots that will lead them to Chrissy's son before it's too late.
A Bad Day for Sorry = A Good Day for Humor
Sophie Littlefield walks a tightrope between dealing with intense issues like domestic violence and not taking herself too seriously while she's doing it. The story is told in third person from Stella's point of view. Stella is an engaging narrator – blunt, wry, both cynical and soft-hearted, and completely devoted to the clients who come to her for help.
Her description of deciding to use erotic bondage equipment to settle her parolees down so she can talk to them – and do anything else she needs to do--is hilarious. So are her interactions with handsome sheriff "Goat" Jones. While Stella may be self-assured at the shooting range, she's delightfully awkward at love and lust.
A Bad Day for Sorry Features Finely Drawn Characters
While Stella by herself would have been treasure enough, in this book she has a richly drawn supporting cast.
First there's Chrissy, Roy Dean's ex-girlfriend and the mother of the missing baby. Chrissy stumbles through the first part of the novel, stuffing her feelings with food and leaning on Stella for support. But as the stakes grow higher, she roars to life as a mother tiger with lethal protective instincts. Her transformation is unexpected but believable, and thoroughly enjoyable.
Then there's sheriff Goat Jones who makes Stella's life harder by being such a good looking lawman. Goat is no dummy, either, He's fully aware that Stella works just this side of the law and that she sometimes crosses boundaries she has no business crossing. The wordplay between him and Stella sets the air crackling with tension, and the unspoken chemistry between them does the rest.
Even the minor characters are memorable, from the seriously sleazy Roy Dean, to mafia dupe Patrick, to Stella's daughter with whom she has had a falling out, to the living memory of Stella's dead husband Ollie.
A Bad Day for Sorry is a Solid Entry in the Crime Genre
Is A Bad Day for Sorry perfect? No. The mystery part of the novel, for instance, where Stella is trying to find out who took Chrissy's baby, is a little thin. It's more than obvious who the bad guys are. But the imperfections are minor and the final product as a whole more than makes up for them.
Bottom line: if you're in the mood for a funny, rousing, politically incorrect crime story, you won't find one much better than A Bad Day for Sorry.
Book Information
Title: A Bad Day for Sorry
Author: Sophie Littlefield
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Copyright: 2009
Length: 280 pages
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