Reviewed by Annika
TITLE: Cops and Comix 
SERIES: Murder and Mayhem #0.5
AUTHOR: Rhys Ford
PUBLISHER: Dreamspinner Press
RELEASE DATE: November 16, 2018
LENGTH: 38 pages
BLURB:
It’s all fun and games until someone leaves a dead body on the floor.
Life for comic book store owner Alex Martin usually runs to the mundane. Sure, he has a regular influx of geeks and freaks, but for the most part, it’s a familiar weird. That all changes when he opens up Planet X Comics one morning and finds a corpse in the middle of his shop.
When Detective James Castillo is called in to investigate, Alex is torn between wanting to climb the man like a tree and giving him a wide berth. Luckily for Alex, the handsome detective is just as interested in him—as a suspect in the murder.
REVIEW:
I love the Murder and Mayhem series and couldn’t wait to read the story about how Alex and James met, to get a bit more backstory into a universe I love so much.
For Alex Martin strange is kind of the norm. What else could it be when he runs a comic shop where the geeks and wonderfully weird comes knocking on a daily basis. But when he finds a dead body on the floor of his shop he knows that it was going to be a day he’d never forget. Detective James Castillo is called to the scene of the crime, and as soon as they set eyes on each other, they are goners.
There was a lot of potential to the story. I loved the Alex and James and the plot was interesting and fun at times, but it felt too rushed. I never felt like I got the chance to really get to know our main characters or that they really got a chance to form a connection. It fell a bit flat, and that really hurts me to say, because I *know* that their story could have been a great one. It’s all there, but in the end it wasn’t quite enough, it needed to be a full length novel.
In the end I’m still glad to have read the story, to know more about Alex and James but at the same time it’s not one I’m likely to read again.
RATING: 
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