This book couldn't decide whether it wanted to be a light-hearted Rom-Com or a gritty murder mystery. The characters were poorly drawn, relying on lazy stereotyping. The conceit of the book is that the 'heroine' behaved badly in the opening scene, but her actions were acceptable because her fiancé cheated on her with her best friend during their Rehearsal Dinner. Okay, fine. Totally buy that. But then she just kept acting like a jerk for the rest of the book until it eventually became clear that she's always awful. Her love interest (if you can even call him that as he was such a minor character) was no better. He's the sort of male character who engages in behavior that (if he were not incredibly wealthy) would tempt a woman to seek a restraining order. But he's rich, so apparently he's actually just a little misguided but deeply romantic.

The novel was also weirdly racist. I found it a bit off-putting that so much of a plot was set around restoring an old Antebellum mansion on a former cotton plantation, and the author used caring about historical accuracy as a character trait... but no one ever mentioned the people that were once enslaved there? Apparently the cotton just picked itself? Another gross moment was when the heroine's father started dating a woman, and her best friend started speculating on whether or not the woman knew 'any of those, like, kinky geisha girl tricks" because she happened to be Asian-American. But the weirdest line had to be when the heroine's father explained that he trusted his daughter to handle herself around her playboy fiancé because she was "white and of age." Umm... what? I'm aware that characters can have traits not shared by the author, but it bothered me that these comments were never challenged or interrogated in the text.

Also, it seems worth noting that the story was mind-numbingly boring. Pages and pages of watching the heroine go antiquing in various shops and flea markets.

tl;dr: This book was spectacularly bad.