Saturday, January 29, 2011

Review: Coffee to Die For, by Linda French

Coffee to Die For by Linda French:

Alongside Teddy, Sister Bede Kinney sat with hands clasped, the picture of perfect humility and call-to-service. In Bede's eyes danced the question: just how did Asian boys in ballgowns fit into the Lord's great Scheme of Things?


Synopsis: History professor Teddy Morelli has a complicated family, and while she's not quite investigating her brother-in-law's murder, she is trying to clear her sister of all charges. While not getting together with her ex-husband and trying to locate her mother in the Galapagos.

Teddy Morelli's sister Daisy is complicated: the ditzy vegan owner of a stuffed rabbit company, she's being cuckolded by her husband Leo, a botanist developing a $10mil strain of coffee. The humiliation ends when Leo is stabbed to death in his lab, but then the coffee plants go missing, and one of Daisy's sketchiest employees has embroiled everyone in a weed deal with Alaska. No, like three whole very large cities in Alaska. And then he takes off. Good times.

Here's the thing: French only wrote three Teddy Morelli mysteries, and I've read all three. For me, they're the complete package: technically flawless writing, fascinating characters (not all likeable), interesting plot and setting setting setting. The stories roam all over Washington State and rope in a number of the strange small people who live in the cracks in the world.

This installment of the series is possibly the least believable in terms of plot denouement, but I found I was having too good of a time to care much.

Also? Bonus points for safe sex talk. It was not just well-integrated and welcome, but hot and funny too.

Damn I wish there were more than three entries in the series. *sigh*

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