Bubba and the 12 Deadly Days of Christmas was on BookBub and sounded funny so I got it. It’s one of those books that tries so hard to be funny you lose track of the story until you reach the end and think “Is that all there was?” The plot is ridiculous.
Bubba Snoddy, grown son of the current Snoddy matriarch, lives at home with his mother in the decrepit Snoddy mansion near a small Texas town. Bubba’s cousins from Louisiana are visiting with an eye to appropriating anything in the house that may have value. Bubba wants to date gorgeous sheriff deputy Willodean but lacks courage to ask her out. Oh, then he finds a corpse dressed in the Santa suit in the city’s Christmas display.
Of course the local police chief assumes Bubba is the murderer, arrests him with a concussion, then spends the rest of the novel chasing around for clues to prove Bubba killed the Santa, the older lady, assaulted the sheriff and is after Bubba’s mother. Everything ends up tied neatly with a bow at the end except the chief still thinks that if Bubba didn’t commit this murder he’ll surely commit one next week.
The book could have been so much more. The interplay with the covetous cousins and their 10 year old active, intelligent son Brownie was fun to read and could have been the focus of the story instead of a nonsensical murder rampage. Bubba reveals a more complicated character during the book than the one-dimensional redneck he seems initially. Had author C. L. Beville spent more time on the family and less on too-neat murders it could have been a good book.
I noticed the reviewers on Amazon mostly liked the novel with under 10% giving it low marks. I would give it 2 or 3 stars; it wasn’t good enough that I want to read more Bubba books, but it wasn’t so bad that I stopped midway. It’s a fast read with some funny scenes interspersed with bad word plays and incredibly stupid-acting police and villains. I’m not a fan of making fun of people who talk funny or believe and act differently and didn’t enjoy the redneck cliches.
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