Stakeouts and Strollers
by Rob Phillips

My rating: 2 / 5
Genre: Mystery

Charlie Shaw is a journalist-turned-private-investigator who, on his first case, ends up getting caught up in a high-stakes mystery involving a teenage girl looking for her estranged dad and a couple of shady bar owners. Meanwhile, he has a six-month-old daughter at home who isn’t sleeping through the night, so he’s running low on sleep too.

I was intrigued by the idea of this new dad trying to balance a new job with his upended home life, and I enjoy a good mystery to boot. However, I realized a little ways into this book that I just wasn’t very engaged. The main character isn’t all that interesting to me, the mystery is lackluster, and the new-baby angle is weirdly both too present and not present enough. The MC does take the baby on a couple of stakeouts with him, which seems like a questionable move, but her irregular sleeping patterns mostly just cause the MC and his wife to yawn at each other randomly. But then conversations about the baby and the MC checking up on her using a monitor app on his phone all just get a bit repetitive. I suppose I’m the wrong audience for a book that focuses this much on what life with a baby is like, because I’m about 16 years removed from that part of life and was never one that wished the helpless-baby phase could have lasted forever.

There were elements of the story that just felt off to me, too. For example, a character that is touted as being super tough and a veteran investigator, etc., lets someone get the jump on him way too easily. And the mystery seemed like it sort of plodded along, until the MC watched his baby do some particular thing and then suddenly was struck with a realization that is kept from us at first, to be revealed later—all of this is a common mystery trope, but the realization he had turned out to be a HUGE leap. Maybe I missed a vital clue, but even when it was explained, it was clear that it was a major guess made by the MC, rather than information he cleaned in passing, experience, or anything like that, coming into play. I kinda think that the target audience for this book is a bit too niche—men who have daughters and enjoy procedural mystery stories. Also, there’s quite a bit of language. I don’t think I could really recommend this book to anyone, but please check out the link below for other reviews if you’re interested.

Thank you to Netgalley and St. Martin’s Press for providing me a copy of this book to review.

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