Witty Little Knitter

Some of the problems with this book can certainly be blamed on the fact that it's the second in a series and I didn't read the first one. There are frequent allusions to events that happened in the first book and it's hard to understand them completely without knowing what exactly happened there.

there are also a lot of characters and it was really hard to keep them apart and this can't be blamed just on the fact that I don't know the first book. The characters simply had no depth...I can't even tell you the name of the amateur-sleuth. It might be Hannah or she might just be a close friend of the sleuth and I already forgot her name again because all the characters seem more or less interchangeable anyway. (This wasn't helped by the sudden POV-changes without warning but perhaps the formatting will be changed a bit in the final copy so there'll at least be some breaks between the POV-switches).

The random Amish phrases that were used in the book also seemed off to me. Or rather how they were used. All the Amish in the book would talk English (with each other and with outsiders) with the occasional Amish phrase (for words like yes, no, mother, prayer etc.) thrown in. I don't know much about Amish but after some time on Wikipedia I figured (correct me if I'm wrong) that Amish usually speak Pennsylvania Dutch with each other and English with outsiders and while bilingual people obviously will occasionally mix up languages it seems unlikely that this means they use bruder instead of brother every single time). The language didn't seem very authentic to me but more like a bad fanfiction in which the author says 'This character is French so he now will say merci instead of thanks'.

The case itself was something I might have been content with if the other things hadn't bothered me that much but it was also mediocre at best. There was a very obvious suspect who won't have done it because it's never the obvious one (after the 30% I managed I have no idea who really did it so I give the book that much). 

ARC provided by NetGalley.