Meh, a few too many plot points. ( )

Never a dull moment, I even tempted motion sickness to finish this one in the car! ( )

Synopsis: Being married to Phil and continuing to live in the Coronado Apartments is wonderful. Beginning their private investigation business isn’t so easy. Helen is once again in a dead-end job as a receptionist in a gym, but this time it’s undercover as a private investigator. The deaths in the gym and the drug abuse that can be associated with professional body sculpting add to the confusion around a wandering husband and suicide investigations that Phil and Helen took from their first clients.
Review: Well-crafted and entertaining, ‘Pumped for Murder’, provides realistic insight into gym memberships and family relationships. ( )

Pumped for Murder by Elaine Viets was a great cozy, a fast, not let you go read. This is the tenth in a series about dead end jobs.

There were two mysteries plus something carried over from the previous books that I didn't really understand. It seems that her very young nephew hit her ex husband with a metal baseball bat, I won't say any more about that. But I was confused enough to wonder about about the main character's morals. Helen Hawthorne was a great character otherwise. I want to go back and start the series at the beginning to find out about the baseball bat business.

Helen is the one who ends up in dead end jobs for each book, this time she was working in a fitness gym and I really got interested in the fitness fanatics and the competitive body builders. Some of the descriptions would make me want to read them over again, they were so colorful. Helen sets out to investigate the husband of her client to see who he is builing his muscles for but there is a murder in the gym and was the most interesting part of the book for me.

The second mystery that Helen and her new husband were investigating was to find whether a car refurbisher's brother committed suicide or murder. That one was more complicated. When reading this cozy, I thought it was like getting two cozies in one.

I highly recommend it but if you haven't read the previous books, you may be as lost as I was about the metal bat. ( )

Helen's days of running are over and so the dead-end jobs should end, but she and Phil now own a private investigation agency and Helen finds herself in another dead-end job in order to solve a case. While working this case, Helen does what she normally does-finds a body. Now, along with the two cases she and Phil are working on, Helen must prove that Evie isn't a murderer, even if the detective has already closed the book on the case.

I enjoyed the book-until the end, which seemed abrupt to me. It read as if this was the last book in the series. Viet neatly ties up the loose ends of everyone that had been arrested, and other one time characters in this book. There was very little mention of Rob's death or the blackmailer. I thought there would be a lot more of the book devoted to that issue. ( )