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Mark @ Carstairs Considers (2200 KP) rated And Then There Were Crumbs in Books

Nov 22, 2019

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.

Kudos

Mark @ Carstairs Considers (2200 KP) rated Al Dente’s Inferno in Books

Feb 26, 2020

Nell’s Move Comes Complete with Murder

Nell Valenti has turned her love of food and her training as a chef into a career helping establish farm to table cooking schools. When she is offered a job setting up a school for Chef Claudio Orlandini in Tuscany, she jumps at the chance. Not only is she looking for some changes in her life, but Chef Claudio is her culinary idol. However, Nell is shocked upon her arrival to discover that the villa Chef Claudio owns is in worse disrepair than she expected, meaning the transformation is going to be more work than she’d expected. Then comes the news that a kick off dinner with some local dignitaries is scheduled for the next evening. Even worse, the dinner ends with some of the guests dead and Chef Claudio missing. What has Nell gotten herself into?

I picked up this book with high hopes. It’s fun to see a cozy in a new setting, and Tuscany appealed to me. Unfortunately, the language barrier made the book hard to get into initially. Yes, we need bits of Italian, and not all of the characters are going to speak English, but it felt like too many Italian words and phrases were thrown out, and we had to wait for the translation to appear or figure out what was meant in context. While it took a bit longer to be hooked than I would have liked, it did happen once the plot kicked into high gear. We are treated to a great mystery with plenty of suspects. As Nell pieces things together, I was in awe of just how well the clues were laid out for us. Nell is a good main character, and the core cast also comes to life for us as well. There are some laugh out loud funny scenes here, and, of course, we get a delicious sounding recipe at the end. The characters, plot, and setting make this a fun debut.