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Mark @ Carstairs Considers (2426 KP) rated Charred in Books

Feb 25, 2023  
Charred
Charred
GP Gottlieb | 2023 | Mystery
5
5.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
Will Alene Get Charred During the Pandemic’s Early Days?
This book opens in May 2020 and finds Alene Baron trying to keep her café in Chicago opened with a reduced staff and takeout or delivery only. Things are complicated when her long lost uncle returns to town and wants to connect with his brother, Alene’s father. Oh, and there are bodies turning up in burned out buildings owned by Alene’s best friend’s husband.

Since this is the third book in the series, I like the characters. That helped me get on board with the story that is truly the main story in the book, not the mystery that you’d expect in a culinary cozy. While I enjoyed the real main story, that backwards emphasis bothered me, especially how the story of the burned out buildings was resolved. I’m not sure I was ready to read a book set during the pandemic, but the book does a good job of capturing how everyone was feeling about life then. However, it introduces the riots before the event that triggered them happened in real life. The end result was only average.
  
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Mark @ Carstairs Considers (2426 KP) rated And Then There Were Crumbs in Books

Nov 22, 2019  
And Then There Were Crumbs
And Then There Were Crumbs
Eve Calder | 2019 | Mystery
5
5.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
Unfortunately, the Mystery Got Crumbs
Looking for a fresh start, Kate McGuire packs up and moves from New York City to Coral Cay, Florida, where she lands a job working at The Cookie House. On her first day on the job, Stewart Lord stalks into the bakery. He is a real estate developer who has decided to buy up Coral Cay and turn the entire island into a resort for the rich and famous, and he has The Cookie House in his sites as his first purchase. He makes the owner, Sam, a rock bottom offer, but only leaves with some cinnamon rolls he demanded from Sam. A few hours later, Stewart is dead, and Sam’s cinnamon rolls are the culprit. The police arrest Sam, but Kate doesn’t think her new boss is a killer. Can she prove he didn’t poison Stewart?

Between the fact that this is a culinary cozy and it is set in the Florida Keys, I was ready to sit back and enjoy. Unfortunately, it didn’t live up to my expectations. I was captivated at first. The setting is very real and fun and comes to life. Kate quickly makes a lot of fantastic friends, and I enjoyed hanging out with all of them. The further I went into the book, the more frustrated I became with the pacing of the mystery. We spend significantly more time watching Kate work to save and transform the bakery while Sam is in jail than we do getting clues to who might have killed Stewart. It’s a shame because there is a good mystery here; we just needed more of it. All the baking certainly made me hungry for bread and cookies, but there aren’t any recipes at the end of this book. Plenty of people seem to love this book, so if the premise interests you, I recommend you pick it up and judge the results for yourself.