Death Loves a Messy Desk (A Charlotte Adams Mystery #3) by Mary Jane Maffini

1 out of 5 stars.

Charlotte Adams is a professional organizer and nothing makes her happier than freeing people from clutter. Her free time lately though, has been taken up solving murders. Her latest is when she is hired by a woman to assist in organizing a coworker’s hopelessly cluttered desk. But when the coworker behind the mess goes missing, tempers rise within the company. Now, Charlotte must open a brand-new folder and she hopes it won’t be filed under M for murder.

I thought I was really lucky when I snagged the first 4 books in this series at a library book sale. How rare is that?! The first one didn’t leave me feeling too fortunate though and I had to force myself to finish the second one. Halfway through this third book, I was done and abandoned it altogether. I spent so much time rolling my eyes, that I was giving myself a headache. The way the main character, Charlotte, just inserts herself into these cases and acts like no one else is even trying to figure out who the killer is just really bothers me. She has no reason to be involved and comes off as a huge busy body. I also find it laughable that she’s so quick to insult Nick, a police officer and husband to her friend Pepper, for being stupid and always bumbling things up, yet she is far from bright herself and when it comes to bumbling, she’s just as bad, if not worse, than he is! The rest of the characters are just sprinkled in here and there with no real purpose and don’t really offer much to this story as they did in the previous books. I really didn’t care who the killer was so I didn’t even bother to read the end.