In which trek reviews Moving Violation

I borrowed Moving Violationby Melanie Jackson from a fellow Lendler. I was looking for a light, quick summer read and this seemed to fit the bill, despite some fairly critical reviews over on Amazon.

This is the first book in the Chloe Boston series. Chloe is a short, slight meter maid whose dearest dream is to make detective. Unfortunately, one of the requirements of the local police department is the ability to lift a 100 pound sandbag, which is pretty much impossible since Chloe can't deflect the scale's needle that much fully dressed, shod, and soaking wet.

Officer Boston is determined to prove to the new police chief that the ability to solve crimes does not depend on a brawny build so when a local real estate developer, Rupert Sellers, turns up dead at the skateboard park the same night her fellow parking violations officer, Jeffrey Little, disappears, Chloe feels there could be a link. Oh, yes, and the victim's wife claims that sixty-thousand dollars have gone missing as well. Shut out of the official investigation into Sellers' death and with no one else on the force concerned with Jeffrey's disappearance, Chloe launches her own investigation.

Jackson has created a protagonist with several odd quirks. The first one is her insistence on taking Blue, her 14-year-old dog, just about everywhere with her, including on her parking violation beat; a second is her ability to find lost items; and a third is ANALYTICO, which is what she calls her own personal logic language that she employs to find connections between pieces of data. I suppose this is meant to be cute or something but it comes across kind of flat to me. ANALYTICO seems to be a skewed corruption of the SQL database language. This example is taken from location 2378:

"RETRIEVE Jeffrey FROM FACT BASE. Next, EXTRACT Sellers as well."

Um, yes, well, moving right along.

The book itself is very short so not a lot of time invested. Simple, light summertime reading. Despite some plot weaknesses, the solutions to the three mysteries are somewhat clever. The remaining eight books in the series are even shorter, more along the lines of novellas than full-length novels. If not for some decidedly adult situations, I'd think that this was a book written for children Neatnik's age.