Read 'Em and Eat: Books, Food, Reviews

Pumpkin creme brulee and the romantic heroine:

2012-02-14T09:16:00.000-08:00

via author Penny Watson's blog:

Lucy was somewhat mortified that her hands shook each time she waited on him. When she leaned over the table to serve him her pumpkin crème brulée, his delicious scent hit her like a steam engine...smoky rum and dark spices. Rough callused hands gripped the shaking dish, and saved her the embarrassment of dropping the dessert in his lap. Horrified by her clumsiness, and totally unnerved by her reaction to him, she fled. But not before she noticed him peeking down her blouse. The look of hunger in his eyes had nothing to do with her crème brulée.

--Penny Watson, Sweet Inspiration

Very very tempting... (also, blog post contains the recipe for pumpkin creme brulee and now I am stuck at work thinking yummy thoughts and having to be content with a Clif Bar wah)

Your moment of culinary zen:

2012-01-22T17:02:00.000-08:00

From Elizabeth Bear's "Lucifugous":

Mrs. Smith was already seated on the divan, applying a silver fork to the pastry on her canary-yellow Meissen cake plate. She had acknowledged Sebastien earlier. Now, he touched the teacup to his lips before he set it, and its saucer, on the side table. ‘Mrs. Smith,’ he said. ‘You seem very calm.’

Her eyebrows rose over the frame of her spectacles. ‘I’m screaming inside,’ she said, and laid the fork down beside her plate. ‘But that’s no reason not to eat.’

A classic locked-room mystery set aboard a dirigible, with vampires and steampunk, that moment with the canary-yellow Meissen cake plate is still my favorite part of the story. "Lucifugous" appears in the collection New Amsterdam.

Review: "Sharpshooter" (2002)

2012-01-06T16:50:00.000-08:00

It always interested Sunny to see how a person reacted to a glass of wine or a new food. It was a one-second preview of how they would act when faced with the unpredictable, a snapshot of how they approached experience. Some people were hardly aware they had a glass in their hand, and the wine in it would be gone before they realized they were drinking. Charlie wasn't a connoisseur and didn't pretend to be one, but he was clearly interested enough to want to stop and taste what he was drinking. Meanwhile, Monty was explaining why the rocky soil in St.-Emilion, France, was superior to the rocky soil anywhere else in the world, and why this particular wine displayed its qualities better than most.

Synopsis: Wine weenies in the Napa Valley band together to drink wine, get accused of murder, drink wine, fight about insect invasions, drink wine and then accuse each other of the murder in question. Leftover wine winds up in everyone's coffee.

Grade: C+

You guys, I really, really wanted to give this one an A.

I first ran across this series by reading the sequel to Sharpshooter, Death by the Glass, and I'm very glad I did, because it's a much better book. Call it debut jitters or working the kinks out, but there are three major things wrong with Sharpshooter:

1. I loathe the trope of the amateur sleuth who calls up a hard-working police officer and tells him to meet her for coffee in 10 minutes, and he drops everything and goes. Seriously? That's a realistic picture of law enforcement. Add that to the evidence-tampering our amateur sleuth gets up to and she should have found her ass in jail, not in a booth at Bismarck's.

2. This whole idea that said amateur sleuth can run around all la, I just dropped by to see your place and...oh...ACCUSE YOU OF MURDER. OR INFIDELITY. OR CHEATING ON YOUR TAXES. WHATEVER YOU'VE GOT GOING.

I mean, I'm sure it's a feasible thing, but I'm also sure that amateur sleuth would get her face slapped right off her head at some point.

3. There are plotholes, and then there are the Lincoln Tunnels o' Plot. There is, for example, a subplot about thievery at the restaurant that has hands-down the least believable solution ever. Also, the whole ending to the book. Just... what? What? No. NO! Very nearly OH JOHN RINGO NO.

So why didn't this book get an F? Simple. Because Gordon can write.

Her descriptions of the Napa Valley and the intricacies of winemaking and the wine business and sustainable agriculture are A-worthy. They're bleeding-off-the-page vivid and fascinating, so by the time you realize you've learned something, you just don't care because the prose is so beautiful.

Sunny McCoskey is the owner and chef at Wildside in St. Helena, north of Napa, and when her friend Wade Skord is charged with murdering the unlikeable scion of Beroni Vineyards, McCoskey throws herself into the case. Despite the obvious police interference aspect. Despite the fact that when it becomes clear she's unhinged, Wade asks her to stop. Despite the fact that you know, owning a restaurant takes actual work (Hannah Swensen, line one).

Sure things get solved eventually but I have read a ton of mysteries, people, and the underpinnings of who did what? Are as flimsy as well-baked pie crust. The why makes sense, but in no way the who, and the Boss Battle at the end is ludicrous.

However, those sentences. Those sentences. So lush and plummy and lickable, and the wealth of detail about the Napa Valley lifestyle and the restaurant life, it is pornworthy, is what, and in this case it lets Gordon basically get away with murder.

Recommended for hardcore foodies and oenophiles only.

Let's get criminal, criminal / I wanna get criminaaaaaaal

2012-01-05T09:44:00.000-08:00

Yeah I know. Big dork. But check out how that song's gotten stuck in your head now for the rest of the afternoon. Mm-hm. These things happen.

Super excited to be participating in Criminal Plots II, a reading challenge over at Jen's Book Thoughts. Despite the fact that I read 119 books last year* I rarely sign up for challenges because I read in all kinds of different genres and am easily distracted. But this, this is surely doable even for me.

The rules are simple: read six books this year that correspond to:

1. Novel with a weapon in the title;

2. Book published at least 10 years ago;

3. Book written by an author from the state/province/etc. where you live;

4. Book written by an author using a pen name;

5. Crime novel whose protagonist is the opposite gender of the author;

6. A stand-alone novel written by an author who writes at least one series.

I can do this!

In fact, I've already got the first three picked out:

1. Novel with a weapon in the title:

2. Book published at least 10 years ago:

(published in 1998, which is apparently more than 10 years ago although HOLY COW, REALLY??)

3. A stand-alone novel written by an author who writes at least one series:

Although I'm not sure if that last one counts; I love Elaine Viets' Francesca Vierling series, and as far as I can tell, this Josie Marcus entry, while being part of a different series, appears to be her only foodie mystery, so for me, it's a standalone. (Does that make sense? Discuss.)

I'll have to give that last one some thought. Culinary mysteries do have a tendency to appear as series, so it's not inconceivable that this is as standalone as I can manage. Either way though, I've been looking forward to this Viets book for quite some time, so I might have to devour it first. Nom nom nom.

Anyone else up for joining Jen's challenge?

*My GoodReads goal was 120. Missed it, by that much ][

Review: "Deathday Party" (1999)

2011-12-03T09:51:00.000-08:00

"Like I said, people who are careless with their gardening can't be trusted. You just never know what they have in their background. That's why we've got to get out of here, Jane, dear. I am not used to this kind of thing, you know."

"Well, if it makes you feel any better, neither am I. I mean, it's been years since anyone, excuse me, anything tried to impale me with pruning shears."

Synopsis: Southern decorating belle Hillary and her fish-out-of-water assistant Jane agree to cater a party for an eccentric Gothic family, but get trapped at the house by a storm. Then bodies start cropping up everywhere except the family cemetery. It's just that kind of party.

Grade: A-

While this book's technically the second of Carter's Decorating Duo of Deduction series (#1 was Leading an Elegant Death and #3 is Red Wine Goes with Murder) it's all about catering and includes a recipe, so I'm cheerfully including it here.

Broke single mother and California transplant Jane Ferguson takes a job with Hillary Scarborough, the Martha Stewart of the South, despite not knowing a glue gun from a frosting bag. Still growing accustomed to Southern eccentricities, Jane still boggles at their latest catering job: a birthday party for America Elizabeth Bean, a dead woman renowned for having killed someone who may or may not already be dead. But when a storm traps Jane and Hillary at the Bean mansion, they find their hostess dead but unable to stay in her coffin. More bodies follow suit, none of them in the family cemetery, however. And why does the local gas station attendant look just like the telephone repairman and an out-of-town preacher called in to do the honors at the party?

Cozies by now have a ton of tropes attached to them: the amateur sleuth with the failed love life, usually including a terrible ex-husband and a burgeoning relationship with the local lawman (check, check); a sassy sidekick less skilled at detecting (check); and a small town or family full of secrets (check). Bonus points if one of the sleuthing duo is a terrible driver (yup, check).

But there were two things that made this mystery really work for me. One, the banter between Jane and Hillary is phenomenal without straining credulity (a lot like the best of Mary Daheim's Judith McGonigal-Flynn and her cousin Renie) and contains a handful of laugh-out-loud moments.

The other was that one of the biggest cozy tropes, that the amateur detective is usually also a harried mother and failed domestic doyenne here is done to perfection. While Hillary's perfection in these areas highlights Jane's flaws Jane never lets it cow her and she stands up to Hillary repeatedly. You get to see how her detection skills more than make up for all the dust bunnies on her rugs.

I am deeply suspicious of amateur sleuths who have everything pulled together and still manage to have flawless hair, eyes the color of farting cornflowers and "comfortably rounded" figures. Dude, give me the whip-smart, unbrushed, covered-in-cat-hair detectives any day of the week.

I suspect part of the popularity of the Harried Amateur is commentary on the backlash against women who entered the workplace in large numbers during the late 70s and 80s. Hear me out: so many cozies that feature these women were also written by female authors, who en masse, have the effect of saying, look, I may not be the Angel of the Household, but my intelligence more than makes up for that.

Which has nothing to do with food. :)

One recipe included in the book, Hillary's Brandy Sauce, which sounds awesome. I did wish for the recipe for Hillary's pecan and cranberry quickbread, as well as more of a focus on what she recommends the Beans serve at their deathday party as a type of clue to funeral meats and traditions and whatnot, but I wasn't sorry at all that the omission of those things came at the cost of more plot and a slightly madcap dash around a modern-day House of Usher. Highly recommended.

From the table of the Iron Duke, by Meljean Brook:

2011-11-25T10:28:00.000-08:00

One of the many things I liked about this book was the food, and how it, along with the rest of the world, had been ingeniously thought out. In a book set after privation and war, it makes sense that a fresh orange would be the most indulgent of delicacies. I like to see that type of thinking from an author. It's clever.

Take, for instance, the first lines of the book:

Mina hadn't predicted that sugar would wreck the Marchioness of Hartington's ball; she'd though the dancing would. Their hostess's good humor had weathered them through the discovery that fewer than forty of her guests knew the steps, however, and they'd survived the first quadrilles. But as the room grew warmer, the laughter louder, and the gossiping more vigorous, the refreshment table set the First Annual Victory Ball on a course for disaster.

Which meant Mina was enjoying the event far more than she'd expected to.

On the other hand, I completely agree with The Book Smugglers about the Iron Duke's cover. Gah headless man-titty.

Review: "Death by the Glass" (2003)

2011-11-12T21:32:00.000-08:00

"Morales is going to fucking ruin me," said Osborne, puffing as he settled his briefcase and groped for the seat belt. "He's trying to destroy my restaurant." He waited for a response but didn't get one. "Who eats Moroccan food, anyway? Who wants to eat Moroccan food?"

"Moroccans?" said Nick.

Synopsis: Luminous foodie murder set entirely in the overheated, incestuous world of high-end restaurants, with an interesting accidental sleuth and a panoply of interesting supporting characters. Minor hiccups with plotholes and strings left dangling at the end.

Grade: A-

High-stakes wine fraud and murder disguised as a heart attack compel Sunny McCoskey to again toss aside her chef's apron and don the role of sleuth. When the list of suspects includes her new lover, the celebrity chef at a posh Napa Valley eatery, the personal risks of her investigation rise dramatically.

That's the official blurb and it's both accurate and terrible. Here's what really happened.

(For all of you who've ever worked in a restaurant, lots of this will sound familiar. Although if that involves murder, yikes. Talk about your dead-end jobs...)

Sunny McCoskey operates a small gourmet restaurant with her friend Rivka when they're not gossiping with their effeminate heterosexual winesnob friend, Monty, who in my head was both looking and sounding like fashion designer Michael Kors. Go with it. I watch a lot of Project Runway.

Sunny and Rivka hop across the street to do a charity dinner at Vinifera, mainly because of the hunky chef there, Andre. There's some talk about getting back on a relationship horse because Sunny's kind of a wiener. But she's also well-actualized and complicated and an insomniac, so of course Andre leaps at her like a dog on a bone.

However, and this was a little weird, right after her date with Andre (not her dinner with him, thanks) Sunny gets consumed by finding the killer of Vinifera's owner. Who no one thinks got murdered. It's safe to say that Rivka's right on with her assessment of Sunny's honking big intimacy issues.

It's a great book. Sunny and Rivka are fantastic and funny friends and there's food everywhere in this book, mostly being prepared rather than eaten, but also wrapped delicately into such descriptions as "Near the front, parked under a tree, was a Mercedes sedan the color of vanilla ice cream. A black 911, too new to have license plates, sat nearby showing a tease of cherry-red disk brakes through the silver wheel covers."

There are gorgeous descriptions of the Napa Valley throughout, although you do have to roll with the fact that Napa's the kind of place where you can belly up to the bar and talk to the bartender about what kind of red wine to take on a booty call...while eating deep-fried olives stuffed with anchovies. Which I think we all agree are totally a bar-food.

Napa's a very upscale boondocks, or as Rivka and Sunny put it, "Les Boondocks".

There are a couple plotholes, like a scene with a villain menacing early on that's oh, you know, never mentioned again, and we never do find out if Sunny gets her act together with Andre, even by the end of the book. And there are references to things in a previous book but hello, it's a series, so I should just calm down and get over it.

Or just read the rest of the other books.

In the kitchen with five (hardboiled) detectives

2011-10-29T08:46:00.000-07:00

Southern California surf PI Boone Daniels:

“Everything,” Boone says, “tastes better on a tortilla.” This is an article of faith with Boone. He’s lived his life with it and believes it to be true. You take anything—fish, chicken, beef, cheese, eggs, even peanut butter and jelly—and fold them in the motherly embrace of a warm flour tortilla and all those foods respond to the love by upping their game. Everything does taste better on a tortilla.

--Don Winslow, The Dawn Patrol

Inspector John Rebus:

Nothing in the world tasted as good for breakfast as stolen rolls with some butter and jam and a mug of milky coffee. Nothing tasted better than a venial sin.

--Ian Rankin, Knots and Crosses

Detective Inspector Jack Frost:

Two dubious-looking rashers of bacon sweated and cowered in the corner of the fridge. He took them out, sniffed them, and decided to chance it.

The rashers were laid into the frying pan with a generous chunk of recycled dripping, then two eggs were cracked and dropped in, and everything started sizzling and spitting and filling the kitchen with greasy smoke. He turned his attention to making the tea. No tea bags left. Damn and flaming blast!

He ferreted around in the rubbish bin and found a swollen, soggy used bag looking like a drowned mouse. Beggars can't be choosers, he thought as he dumped it in his cup and drowned it again in hot water. Then he buttered some bread, tipped the contents of the frying pan onto a plate, fished a knife and fork out of the washing-up bowl, and settled down to eat.

--RD Wingfield, A Touch of Frost

LAPD Homicide Detective Harry Bosch:

Bosch gave her Pounds's serial number and then the names Gordon Mittel, Arno Conklin, Claude Eno and Jake McKittrick. He said he needed the home addresses on their licenses.

He was put on hold again. During the time he waited he held the phone to his ear with his shoulder and fried an egg over easy in a pan on the stove. He made a sandwich out of it with two slices of white toast and cold salsa from a jar he kept in the refrigerator. He ate the dripping sandwich while leaning over the sink. He had just wiped his mouth and poured himself a second cup of coffee when the clerk finally pciked back up.

--Michael Connelly, The Last Coyote

Psychologist and very serious detective Alex Delaware:

We went into the house. [Milo] fixed himself a bowl of Cheerios and milk, stood at the counter and spooned the cereal down nonstop before pausing to catch his breath. "Hand me a napkin."

--Jonathan Kellerman, Silent Partner

Conclusion: I would never eat at Inspector Frost's house. I might not even touch anything or sit down.

Cooking with Inspector Frost:

2011-10-23T07:43:00.000-07:00

Two dubious-looking rashers of bacon sweated and cowered in the corner of the fridge. He took them out, sniffed them, and decided to chance it.

The rashers were laid into the frying pan with a generous chunk of recycled dripping, then two eggs were cracked and dropped in, and everything started sizzling and spitting and filling the kitchen with greasy smoke. He turned his attention to making the tea. No tea bags left. Damn and flaming blast!

He ferreted around in the rubbish bin and found a swollen, soggy used bag looking like a drowned mouse. Beggars can't be choosers, he thought as he dumped it in his cup and drowned it again in hot water. Then he buttered some bread, tipped the contents of the frying pan onto a plate, fished a knife and fork out of the washing-up bowl, and settled down to eat.

Imaginary foods made real: Maggie Stiefvater creates November cakes

2011-10-15T18:37:00.001-07:00

And they sound freakishly delish:

Of course, as with all food descriptions in my novels, I quickly warmed to my mission and proceeded to fill the pages of the book with more things about "the moist crumb, the nectar that seeps from the base of it, the icing that soaks into the cake before you can lick it off." Oh, yes, now we were getting somewhere. My legacy as a fake food writer was beginning to look more promising.

--via her blog

"Nothing can be fictional if there's a recipe." I kind of want that on a tshirt.

Review: "Cookie Dough or Die" (2011)

2011-09-28T06:42:00.000-07:00

"I'm surprised you're not fat," Olivia teased her brother.

"I'm surprised you're not in jail," Jason said, just before forcing another half of a sandwich into his mouth.

Synopsis: Niche cookie-cutter boutique becomes ground zero for an all-family squabble over inheritance, past sins and murder -- yes, murder. Bonus points for the canine sidekick, no matter what the health department would say.

Grade: B+

I confess, I usually eschew niche cozies that don't involve food. Call me crazy, call me focused, but there are so many culinary mysteries out there to read that I need some sort of focus in order to not be buried under an avalanche of books that need reading. Not that they don't all need reading.

I picked this book up, though, based on the title and cover. Admit it: Cookie Dough or Die is a fantastic title. And then once I started reading, I was hooked. And there's a dog in it.

Olivia Greyson owns The Gingerbread House, a cookie cutter boutique somewhere in or near Maryland, with her best friend Maddie and her rescue dog, Spunky. When her mentor Clarisse is found dead, Olivia's thrown for a loop, and even more so when it turns out to be murder. When it turns out Clarisse left Olivia a hoard of antique cookie-cutters, she basically does a loop-de-loop. But the murderer really wants the secrets kept, their identity never found and oh yeah, all the cookie cutters back.

Very smooth and enjoyable writing. Great quirky characters -- Maddie, the best friend is flighty and sparkly, Olivia's interesting, her love interest, the sheriff, is not obnoxious in the least, and Spunky basically steals the show.

Lowell does a ton of things right in this book: even though Olivia decides to solve the mystery, she never forgets that she has a business to run and a dog to walk, and she prioritizes those well. She has a great support network in Maddie and her mom, but the flow of the story remains well-anchored to the idea that the mystery-solving protagonist is first and foremost a small business owner.

Loved the rest of the townspeople, especially the very terrible newspaper editor, loved the crazy family. It was a little hard to believe the sheriff went along with Olivia's plans for confronting the murderer, but I guess love makes people do strange things.

Will definitely be continuing on with the series.

oh honey honey I'm telling you -- a woman's work is never done

2011-09-05T10:19:00.000-07:00

Andrew’s eyes followed a single drop of water rolling toward her cleavage.

She said, “You know how I got like this?”

“What do you mean?”

She caressed his forearm with electric blue fingernails. He trembled. “Don’t be so polite. You know what I mean. How I lost weight. How I got hot. You remember those nicknames they called me, right? Lard Ass and Rosie O and The Beached Whale –”

“They shouldn’t have –”

“Done that. I know, but I don’t care. It’s all in the past cause of Mom.

Fucked up, feminine and awesome: Skinny Latte, a short story by Chris Rhatigan, over at Shotgun Honey.

There's always some small scrap left in the least likely place

2011-08-09T21:22:00.000-07:00

Nothing in the world tasted as good for breakfast as stolen rolls with some butter and jam and a mug of milky coffee. Nothing tasted better than a venial sin.

--Ian Rankin, Knots and Crosses

Review: "The Teaberry Strangler" (2010)

2011-07-20T12:13:00.000-07:00

"Do you know anything about the language of roses?"

"What do you mean?" asked Theodosia.

"During the Victorian era," said Drayton, "the use of rose symbolism was extremely popular. It became a subtle form of communication."

"Like text messaging today," said Theodosia.

"Not exactly," said Drayton.

Synopsis: The indefatigable Theodosia Browning continues to run her merry crew of teashop irregulars and solve murders all over Charleston's historic shopping district. This time it's Daria, owner of an antique map store, who turns up dead and Theodosia's unlucky enough to witness the crime. So, between running her teashop, hanging out with her dog and trying to close on her new cottage, Theodosia solves the crime.

Grade: C+

Okay people, listen up: I am willing to put up good money for one of the next books in this series to feature Delaine Dash (owner of the Cotton Duck!) as the corpse. Good money. I just can't remember a character who got under my skin like she does. It's amazing. I just...she... flames...on the side of my face...burning--heaving--

Oh this is such a good series, people. It just is. I would have tea at that teashop in an instant, no matter if they were brewing Darjeeling in a dead man's open skull when I got there. The books are just that fun.

It is all about the sense of place, I think, that Childs gives to this series that makes me love it so much. I was trying, the other day, to think of mystery series where I can't think of the series without immediately thinking of the city. Like for me, Sharon McCone will always be San Francisco. And V.I. Warshawski will always be Chicago; Tess Monaghan is Baltimore, the Liquor boys are New Orleans, Archy McNally is Palm Beach and NYC is sort of in a three-way toss-up between the 87th precinct, Claire Cosi and Edward X. Delaney. In exactly the same way, Theodosia Browning is Charleston.

It's a great, iconic series.

But this is not a great, iconic book. It's a good book. It's a solid entry in the series and with a lot of the plot strands, I felt like Childs has a beautiful long sheet of butcher paper tacked up along one wall of her house with all these interwoven strands and Teaberry Strangler is one section, and the next book is another, and there are certain dots that have to advance in certain ways.

For instance, the reintroduction of Jorie Davis, who, while an unfortunate romantic choice (I keep wanting Drayton to pour hot tea in his lap) also keeps things interesting much more than the milquetoast restauranteur Theodosia took up with on the rebound. And the way Theodosia kept wistfully saying "Oh Haley, I do so hope I won't LOSE YOU SOMEDAY WHEN A BIG CATERING OPPORTUNITY COMES ALONG."

Seriously, she said it like four times. Hi. Thanks. I think we now safely know what you've got planned for Haley. Gotcha. Right there with ya. Keep going with the story.

And I liked the story. I liked the cast of weirdos surrounding the victim, and I liked how they were more than they seemed, some of them. I loved how Theodosia gets her big girl heels on whenever someone intends to hurt her dog, because if anyone ever comes after my dogs, you will be able to buy jars of that person as a paste in supermarkets everywhere, I'll tell you that right now.

But two things went wrong here:

1. Okay. No less than five different people were all OH THEODOSIA PLEASE SOLVE THIS MYSTERY YOU ARE SO AWESOME. And then Theodosia blushed and simpered. That is Mary Sue territory. I do not like that. I am not saying Theodosia was a Mary Sue this time out, I'm just saying we can all see that land from here and it's not a good place.

2. The ending. OY the ending. Was not supported by the plot in the least. Noooooo. I went back and looked for clues I'd missed, people, because I spell anal-retentive with a hyphen. It did not make the least sense at all, and took like eight pages from boss fight to glass-clinking resolution and then fin. Like, if you stand up from a fistfight, wipe your hands on a linen napkin then serve punch for guests, I'm sorry, but you're the Cylon. It's you.

Bah.

And humbug.

Which in no way means I'm not going to read the next entry in the series, it just means that if you have a really strong, iconic series -- and I do think it's fair to say this series is iconic at this point -- you can get away with a fair amount of missteps. Just not often.

Review: "If You Can't Stand the Heat" (2011)

2011-07-20T11:37:00.000-07:00

I hate favors. I hate doing them and I hate asking for them. They always sound so quick and innocent at first. A favor. Like a squeeze. But favors replicate, taking on a life of their own. Lending a hand in the kitchen for a few hours turns into a murder investigation, and then one night your house is set on fire. But how could I refuse after what they had done for me?

Synopsis: Poppy Markham caused a rift in her family when she left their Austin restaurant to become a health department inspector. But when a famous French chef is murdered at Markham's, Poppy hurls herself into the investigation. Joined by her hunky ex-boyfriend and her gay neighbors, Poppy squares off against a murderer. And her stepmother. And her stepsister. And the restaurant's general manager. And the sous chef. And...

Grade: B

Poppy Markham is an incredibly likeable amateur detective even when she's being wishy-washy about her ex-boyfriend, Jamie, and obstinate about her stepmother's effect on her father. This is no mean feat. And it's obvious the author has served her time on the line in many, many restaurants, and is very familiar with Austin. These are all good things for this book.

In fact, 3/4 of this book is great fun: light, frothy, funny, snappy and well-written.

And then there's the ending.

Look, I get that endings are hard, and this one actually made a great deal of logical sense; all the pieces in the story fell together and it was completely plausible. So what happened?

Two things. One, the fight with the murderer at the end. It was short and the murderer folded with one well-placed blow by a small health inspector and then the next thing you know, we're having the tearful family reunion at papa's bedside, where he explains everything (conveniently glossing over the ramifications of the solution, which were huge), then everyone hugs, even the people who were at each other's throats for most of the book.

I was like...that's it? I read 230 pages of a great mystery and you just Scooby-Doo'ed me?

Two? Hannah Swensen Syndrome. You heard me, I've now seen it so often in cozies, I'm giving it a name. After The Cookie Jar's own legendary crime-solving absent boss, it's when an amateur detective gets so caught up in solving a mystery that they forget where they work, and the author forgets, too.

Apparently Poppy Markham is a health department inspector who inspects restaurants, so maybe during the book at some point she should...inspect restaurants. She inspected a grand total of one, even though there's a scene where she mentions she's exhausted but has to go check on whether to issue a closing at a restaurant across town; she goes so far as to put the coffee on so she can stay awake for just that, then ...Poppy wakes up the next morning bright and early and makes no mention of whether she did the inspection.

This problem's made worse by the early introduction of Poppy's boss Olive, who we're told is incredibly controlling and micro-managing and calls Poppy at all hours, and then is never heard from again.

Do you know? If I just didn't go to work for a couple days, like three or four, with no explanation, I would definitely hear from my boss, and he's not in the least micro-managing and controlling. So what gives?

With those minor problems aside, it's still a great read, for the most part and I'm very much hoping that there'll be a sequel. The whole concept of the health inspector as detective really gives and gives, so here's to hoping for the next go round, the next person to find a body at a restaurant actually records an infraction or two.

Too many mysteries with sharp pointy things

2011-06-16T19:05:00.001-07:00

I love this book and this idea, but it probably says something about how many murder mysteries I've read that I totally just concocted a murder where the body's found with these things jammed in the eye sockets.

Review: "Biggie and the Mangled Mortician" (1997)

2011-05-14T11:20:00.000-07:00

"Her colors," Mrs Muckleroy said. "I took her over to this woman in Center Point that does your colors for only ten bucks. Meredith Michelle's a perfect Spring -- and Bunny, that's the woman's name, said that's real rare. She said only about fifteen percent of the women in the whole world are Springs. The majority are Summers and Autumns, That's why Meredith Michelle's going to look so splendid in that blue dress I bought her."

"Essie, you need to get back on your nerve medicine," Biggie said.

Synopsis: Texas grandma fights crime and big hair mentality. As told by her 12-year-old son, J.R.

Grade: A+

There's really nothing I don't love about the Biggie Weatherford mysteries, apart from the fact that as far as I can tell there are only five of them. I don't love that bit at all. If it were up to me, that number would have a zero after it.

Job's Crossing, TX, is one of those very very small towns where everyone takes a special delight in getting all up in each other's business and then busting out their family lineage when anyone complains. There are the beautician sisters, Itha and Vida Mae Boggs; the town ne'er-do-well, Cooter McNutt; Butch Jenkins, possibly the only acting sheriff in Texas who chases criminals in three-inch heels; and Biggie Weatherford, a no nonsense philanthropist and grandma to 12-year-old J.R. There's also lots of Dr. Pepper. It's just that kind of place.

In the second book in the series, Job's Crossing's undertaker just up and leaves for Houston, where everyone kills each other with much more regularity, and his replacement causes Itha to fall down in a swoon before he gets his ribs stove in in his own mortuary. Also, Meredith Michelle has her colors read prior to the Texarkana pageant, the new reverend (from Arkansas) gets twitchy around rats, there's a bigfootlike monster prowling the woods along Wooten Creek and Biggie's not letting any of the above stop her from raising the money to turn the old unused depot into a museum, commemorating the time Ma Parker and her boys blew through town and were unfailingly polite to everyone.

I read this book in a day. It was my day off, and I sat on the back steps with a cup of coffee and listened to the springtime, watched my dogs play in the dirt and enjoyed the heck out of this read.

Sure there's a mystery to be solved, but it's largely beside the point, which is how, incidentally, the author treats the story for about fifty pages in the middle. And I don't care. I love Job's Crossing and I loved this whole warm, sunny, Dr. Pepper-soaked story.

There's one recipe included at the back, for an oyster-flavored scrambled eggs (which doesn't really float my boat) but the book is filled to busting with lush and evocative descriptions of all the wonderful things Biggie's cook, Willie Mae, prepares for them day in and day out: devil's food cake with coconut frosting; cold boiled ham with potato salad and fresh biscuits; orange peppers stuffed with ground veal and rice; icebox rolls with butter.

At its heart, this is a story about building a chosen family and embracing your own small community, even when it perms your hair sideways (on account of shock) or breaks its heel running after bad guys across a parking lot (Butch).

Now excuse me while I hie to ebay to find the three missing from my collection.

Review: "The Chocolate Cupid Killings" (2010)

2011-04-15T09:15:00.001-07:00

"One of the scariest things I've heard about Belcher -- and I haven't had any connection with the case, of course -- is that he's quite cold-blooded. If he offed someone in the course of his job with the mob, he did it so coolly that the FBI hasn't been able to prove anything. Apparently the only person he ever hit in anger was his wife."

"I don't find that reassuring."

Synopsis: Ten Huis Chocolade, in Warner's Point, MI, once again finds itself the nexus of murder, while Lee's husband starts acting strangely and the town is overrun by possible Goodfellas.

Grade: B-

There comes a time in every relationship where you have to admit to yourself that either you trust your partner unconditionally, or when they tell you they can't tell you where they're going or who they're meeting with, you take it on faith that they're not fucking around on you.

Especially if one of you has a nasty habit of finding dead bodies.

Lee Woodyard has one of those relationships with her husband Joe, Warner Pier's part-time city attorney-cum-boat restorer. Kinda. So when he's meeting with strange men instead of showing up to family dinners, Lee throws only very small tantrums. Part of this is that they've been at this relationship for what, nine books now, and as mentioned, Lee keeps finding bodies, which is what keeps the books selling. But more than that, Lee's a pragmatist: she'd throw a rock through the front window but it's winter in Michigan and all the rocks are covered in snow.

I like that kind of thinking. I like Lee, in fact.

She's a likeable protagonist: smart and kind but a little bit tongue-tied, but not meek enough to let people walk all over her. And usually, I like Joe, too. However, in this book, his I'd Tell You But Then, You Know schtick soon wears thin and I am left solidly in Lee's camp, looking for the last unfrozen rock by the shores of Lake Michigan.

(Btw, as an aside: I love the setting in these books. I love how washed in Michigan it is.)

Okay, so Cupid Killings: a mysterious man comes into Ten Huis and asks manager/owner/accountant Lee if she's seen the woman in the picture. The photo he shoves across the glass looks remarkably like Pamela, a recent Ten Huis hire who's on the run from her abusive husband. The Ten Huis women spring into action, concealing Pamela and dispatching the mysterious man with haste (and a gift-wrapped box of chocolate cupids) but lo! The mysterious man is a P.I. from Georgia and he has the unmitigated gall to get himself killed behind the Ten Huis dumpster while Lee is very much not throwing rocks at Joe for being mysterious about his meetings.

Cue the dueling news stories about a recently paroled mobster in search of the wife he pummeled pre-jailing, and the possible indictment with prejudice of a hometown financial big-wig and away we go. Murder! Mysterious meetings! The trial of marriage! The sting of corporate espionage on a large and small scale! And the fact that every town in Michigan has either a Lake Shore or a Lakeshore Drive!

Here's the problem: Joe.

Joe, who has, for eight books now, been a dashing, charismatic, somewhat difficult but entirely appropriate foil/partner for Lee and her dead-body-findin' ways, turns into a heel in this book. Like, it's one thing to say "Oh, I wish I could tell you but I still love you and I respect that you're not asking" and it's quite another to get flinty-eyed and stomp up the stairs to bed.

Add to that two things:

1. It was pretty obvious who did what at about the 125-page mark.

2. The ending was a trainwreck.

But here are two other things:

1. Even with the both of the above (and I thought it was pretty smart that one of the EMTs at the end even comments, "Hey, that was a pretty stupid decision y'all made back there.") Carl's writing is technically flawless. It just is. It's not like, sentencecraft of the sublime or miraculous metaphors, but it doesn't have to be. It's like the coffee you find at 7-Eleven at ten o'clock on a Tuesday night: sure, it's been cooking all day and a fancy latte might taste better, but that coffee is there to Do Its Job. It will caffeinate you without a big fuss. And that type of writing is deceptively hard to make look easy.

2. Oh setting and characterization how you curl the wee toes of my cold, black book-reviewer's heart!

I have been visiting Warner's Pier for nine books now and I can say that as soon as the tenth book (WITH PIRATES OMG WHEEEBBQ) I will be snapping it up. I like the politics. I like the place. I like the style. I like the architecture. I like the comfort. I could move there and give old whatnot who spies on everyone at the Superette a run for his money, is what I'm saying.

In short, despite the bad decision-making exhibited by our heroes during the ending (and hello, who among us has not made our share of bad decisions?) and despite Joe being a terrible person who possibly should have been pelted by snow-covered rocks, it was a solid and enjoyable entry in the series.

After all, the path of true love is strewn, it seems, with dead bodies.

Fairy Tale Bakery: It's Kiss or Kill

2011-04-07T18:45:00.000-07:00

(written as part of Jen Forbus' Moonlighting for Murder blog tour. Check it out!)

This is the true story of six strangers, picked to live in a house, to find out what happens when people--

Wait a minute, that's not right.

Ladies and gentlemen: the story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the--

Hang on, bear with me. It's been a long day and all I really want to do right now is curl up in a comfy chair with a good book and a giant cupcake.

Oh that's right! That's what I was going to talk about! Murder!

Here's the thing: I could get on my little electronic soapbox here and tell you all about how awesome Jenn McKinlay's Fairy Tale Bakery series is, but let's face it, I'm just some random dude whose book-review blog you stumbled across while trying to avoid processing a travel reimbursement. I feel you. It's Friday. So, while I've already reviewed both books in depth earlier -- Sprinkle with Murder and Buttercream Bump-Off, let me take only another thirty seconds of your time, then you can go watch awesome videos on YouTube and elsewhere. (Trust me: I feel you on those travel reimbursements.)

So here's the scoop on this series: IT'S AWESOME.

Three reasons why!

1. It's character-driven and complicated.

Hey, you know what would be better than just having bakers stumble across corpses every now and then, get them suspected of the crimes and then try to solve it themselves? If you gave them messy personal lives on top of that.

Mel, Angie and Tate are great, memorable characters in and of themselves, but McKinlay's really created something special by combining them and hitting FRAPPE. Make them stubborn and a little broken and a little more stubborn and kind of crazy -- in other words, realistic.

Oh, and the first book's about Tate's fiancee getting murdered. Gutsy!

2. McKinlay writes really bomber physical comedy.

Yeah, I know it's old-fashioned, but I really love those classic old screwball comedies from the 40s and 50s (Duck Soup, anyone?) but it's really damn hard to get that kind of energy down on the page and make that scene come alive in the same way. There's a frankly *genius* scene in Buttercream Bump-Off where Mel and her new assistant are trying to outwit the hilariously unhinged Olivia, and I'm not going to spoil it for you, but it involves seltzer and sliding under things and screeching and -- and it's all just so VIVID. Sometimes I pull that book down off the shelf and just reread that one section.

The beginning of the third book features something similar (including Olivia, who is possibly my favorite villain ever at this point) and jumping and throwing and rolling ...and screeching.

So sue me, I'm a girl what knows her ticklespots.

3. The recipes make me really, really want to make cupcakes.

They all sound good. Holy tar. I don't bake a ton, but I might have to start. Mojito cupcakes. Tinkerbells (lemon cupcakes with raspberry buttercream frosting, rolled in pink sugar). Orange Dreamsicle cupcakes. White chocolate cupcakes with raspberry frosting.

Mojito cupcakes.

Happy Friday, y'all...

Review: "Murder Can Wreck Your Reunion" (1997)

2011-04-05T15:49:00.000-07:00

"A what?"

"A divorce party," my niece repeated. "Sybil's divorce became final a few weeks ago -- you remember Sybil, my friend from college, don't you?"

"I never met her, but is sounds familiar. I think I remember hearing about her."

"That's what I meant. Anyhow, she's throwing this big bash over the weekend to celebrate her divorce."

"How very nineties of her," I remarked sarcastically.

Synopsis: Plus-sized Manhattan PI Desiree Shapiro leaps into action when her beloved niece, Ellen, attends a college reunion weekend and becomes a suspect in a murder.

Seriously, this type of thing never happens to me. That might be for the best.

Grade: A

The fourth book in the series, this is easily my favorite. There's no recipes, per se, but there's a lot of food that gets eaten in very telling ways. The forced consumption of a lousy meal before a difficult conversation; the death grip on a coffee cup when the way ahead gets hard; escargot and when people feel compelled to comment on them. Who you invite (and don't) to share your French fries and how many shrimp your date snags from a shrimp cocktail he then puts on your tab. This book's got a lot on its plate.

Desiree Shapiro's beloved niece Ellen winds up suspect in a murder when she attends a reunion weekend (the divorce party, above) and one of the guests takes a header from the balcony into an empty swimming pool. There's nothing for it but for Desiree to toss on her best wig and head into battle.

This is a pretty simple, straightforward, incredibly well-managed book. Desiree only has five suspects to investigate (not counting Ellen) and as she works from one to the next, she also works on cases for her other clients, because she's very much the epitome of the hard-working, hustling P.I. She does the jobs other P.I.'s don't like, she does the ones that seem a little scummy or get her yelled at and she does them because she's gotta eat, just like everyone else.

This is also easily the darkest of the series so far, touching on child molestation and gang rape, homicide, pettiness, infidelity and spousalcide.

While Desiree's social calendar (clients, romantic life, Ellen, clients, Ellen) is a whirl, but she never lets it go to her head. The whole slew of supporting characters move across the page with ease but never dominate, and the ending, while narratively satisfying, leaves the reader with no doubt that sometimes there's just resolution and no closure. It's wonderful.

For me, this book hit the trifecta: unforgettable characters, tight plot, technically clean and polished writing style. All that and nary a recipe to be found. Definitely going on the re-read pile.

Review: "Murder Most Frothy" (2006)

2011-04-03T07:17:00.000-07:00

Never one to miss the opportunity for a morbidly inappropriate thought, my mind began to replay the opening of Jaws -- the scene where a young girl is eaten alive during a midnight skinny dip -- and I began to worry whether there were any dangerous sharks in these waters. On the other hand, considering that I was probably chasing a professional hit man who had killed before, I realized that marine life probably should not have been my primary concern.

Synopsis: Manhattan coffeehouse manager Clare Cosi summers in the Hamptons and finds yet another dead body. While disapproving of her (ex-)mother-in-law's and her daughter's love lives, Cosi finds time to uncover an embezzling plot, break into people's houses and not solve the murder.

Grade: B-minus

---

In this fourth entry in Cleo Coyle's Coffeehouse Mystery series, protagonist Clare Cosi has been hired by an uber-wealthy restauranteur to be coffee somelier at his newly opened Hamptons eatery. During a July Fourth party, someone shoots one of the waiters, a guy who looks suspiciously near-identical to the restauranteur. Cosi investigates!

This is really a hard series to get a handle on. On the one hand, the writing is technically crisp and fluid, with lush and flourishing descriptions. On the other, Clare Cosi is driving me bugnuts.

Here's the problem: she doesn't come off as a very likeable person, and it's hard to tell whether Coyle is writing her that way on purpose. Clare meddles in police business and does so badly, like when she's standing over the dead body in the bathroom and yelling at everyone to stay back, because it's a crime scene, or when she's blithely justifying breaking & entering a random stranger's home, simply on the offchance that he's the guy she saw skulking round the edges of a party.

More than that, though, she very actively disapproves of her (adult) daughter, Joy, dating anyone at all (the scene where she very publicly up the phone number some guy gave Joy was excruciating to read) and has a tendency to do a lot of public haranguing. She also disapproves when her (ex-)mother-in-law has a romantic dinner with an old friend:

Of course, they'll share, I thought, heading back to the coffee bar to prepare their order. They're sitting so close to each other, they're practically sharing each other's laps!

Needless to say, I was less than thrilled to see Madame with a new man. Dr. MacTavish had been her steady beau for over a year, and I had become used to that...comfortable with that. She hadn't broken up with the good doctor, of that I was sure. Yet here she was tonight practically giddy over Edward.

Now, to be fair, Clare immediately follows that thought with the realization that Madame has a right to make her own choices, lead her own life, that it really was her business and no one else's....but then right after that Joy appears with the same questions and Clare turns the tables on her daughter, asking after her date and making it known that she disapproves of both relationships. Joy stalks out, aggravated.

It's a tightrope act, I think, managing Clare's attitude.

Madame takes her to task for it, Joy takes her to task for it, and even Clare's ex-husband takes her to task for her meddling, but there's no evidence that Clare takes any of their words seriously. She blithely continues to do exactly how she pleases, providing unasked-for and unwanted advice, snapping at people, etc etc.

BUT, it's nearly brilliant.

For Coyle to have created someone like Clare, and given her this serious character flaw AND have other characters go hey, that's a honking big character flaw you've got there...I really like that. It makes Clare complicated and difficult and very, very believable. If she was just sailing round being unpleasant to her family, that would be a problem. But she sails round being unpleasant to her family and they call her on it. I love that. She may not be changing any time soon, but neither is my mother, so you know, ten points, Cleo Coyle.

Now, there's a plot twist at the very very end (which I am not going to spoil) but I will simply say that I thought it was entirely out of character for the protagonist. I think it was meant to show that she had gained some empathy for Joy and Madame and calmed down a little bit, but instead I felt like it was just Clare wanting to have her coffee and drink it too. I was hoping [the plot twist] would happen, but when it did, I felt like something was seriously missing.

Recap: very, very nice writing style; fascinatingly horrible protagonist. The plot of this one I thought played a little too loosely (at some point, is someone going to lock Clare up for, oh, I don't know, BREAKING THE LAW? Also, her ex-husband only shows up when he has things to do to advance the plot, then he's never heard from again) than some of the other entries, but overall it makes for a decent beach read and a very telling look at Clare's interpersonal relationships.

Review: Buttercream Bump-Off (2011)

2011-03-20T16:35:00.000-07:00

"You are aware he's a murder suspect." Martinez turned away from the sink and studied Angie with concern.

"He didn't do it," she said. "He's a musician, not a killer."

"Don't fool yourself," Martinez said. "I once had a case where a Sunday-school teacher chopped up her husband and put him in the freezer because he kept leaving his underwear on the bathroom floor."

"Well, that would grate after a while," Angie said.

Synopsis:In which the author does several hard things with seeming ease and wins me over for life.

Grade: A

Thing the first! Series are hard. And then there's that whole "sophomore curse" thing. Say you've got a great idea and you rip through and write a book from it. Everyone loves the book; you're riding high! WOO! And then the next book's due and there are these shoes that are apparently yours and you have to live up to the first book and then there's a batch of cookies in the pantry and before you know it there are just crumbs and nerves. I'm not saying that happened here, because you know, this book? The second in McKinlay's series? IS PHENOMENAL. It's just as good as the first and, more importantly, it's good in some different ways. The characters take off in interesting arcs and people behave like people would, that is to say flawed and imperfectly. I love this!

Thing the second! Madcap physical comedy is very, very hard to write. It's hard to coordinate everyone and find all the words for how exactly someone slides across a greasy restaurant kitchen floor on their knees and that other word for the noise they make when they smack into the fridge and meanwhile there are all those airborne pies and -- and McKinlay makes it look effortless.

The Fairy Tale Cupcakes Bakery keeps rocking along as the novel opens, and if co-owner Melanie Cooper's relationship with her DA boyfriend has stalled, well everyone gets busy sometimes. Then her mother starts dating, she and Angie run a Valentine's Couples Cupcakes class, someone gets killed and a rock star drops into the midst of everyone and makes Angie and the bakery's third partner have to take stock of their situation. Also, Angie's brothers attempt to regulate her love life, with the inevitable tragic results.

Look, I'm being vague for a reason. Even if you haven't read the first installment of the series, you should read this one. It's that relative rarity in genre writing: a good book. Not just a good mystery, but a really gripping, fun, well executed story. I loved it. I just don't want to spoil it for everyone else.

Review: "Writing the Meal: Dinner in the Fiction of Early Twentieth-Century Women Writers" (2002)

2011-02-25T08:19:00.001-08:00

In Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding,' the bride herself is described as a piece of cake: she wears 'a white dress trimmed with stripes and bows of coloured ribbon, giving her the appearance of an iced cake all ready to be cut and served in neat little pieces to the bridegroom beside her' (706).

Synopsis: Fascinating look at female Modernist writers and disordered eating in fiction.

Throughout the book, the author pushes and pulls against Patricia Moran, who is a seriously big scholar in Modernist Food Disorders, and also happened to be an undergrad professor of mine. McGee loves what Moran has done with Virginia Woolf's fiction, but seems to be quite bitter about her analysis of Katherine Mansfield. And there's this lovely cattiness to the whole interchange that is hella amusing.

I was excited to see that not only does the author whale away at Mansfield and Woolf, who are the standard-bearers of this field, but she also looks at Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin and Zora Neale Hurston, which was refreshing. Elizabeth Bowen didn't make the cut, but you can't have everything.

I'm still waiting for a comparison of male and female Modernists in this area, though.

Huh. Something tells me I'm going to be waiting for quite some time.

Review: "How to Cook a Tart" (2003)

2011-02-24T11:21:00.000-08:00

Of all the herbs, Jasmine thought, basil was her soul mate. She rubbed her fingers over a leaf and sniffed deeply at the pungent, almost licorice scent. Basil was sensuous, liking to stretch out green and silky under a hot sun with its feet covered in cool soil. Basil married so well with her favorite ingredients: rich, ripe tomatoes, a rare roast lamb, a meaty mozzarella. Jasmine plucked three leaves from her basil plant and slivered them in quick, precise slashes, then tucked them into her salad along with a tablespoon of slivered orange rind. Her lunch today was to be full of surprises.

Synopsis: Tired of the DC diet scene, her anorexic teenager's backtalk and her husband's secrets, mid-list cookbook author Jasmine March embarks on a quest to make fat fun again. Which in no way explains the corpse on her kitchen floor.

I loved it.

Even if it hadn't had a mysterious inscription on the flyleaf, I would still have loved this curious, over-the-top little novel.

At the beginning of the book Jasmine is presented to the reader as an object of pity: the fat wife of a handsome man, the awkward mother of a lanky, beautiful teenager and a cookbook author hopelessly out of touch with the current trends in beautiful, low-calorie fusion foods.

But the measure of a great character is how they respond to adversity, and the worse things get, the more Jasmine gets her shit together and stops accepting other people's excuses. She continues to take refuge in her great love of food and cooking, but as she accepts it as her strength, she also learns to wield it like a weapon.

Other reviews I've read of this book take it to task for Killham's style ("Everything about How to Cook a Tart, the debut novel from Washington Post food writer Nina Killham, is too much." --amazon review) and it's definitely a dense, almost overwrought style that takes some getting used to. You'll either love it or you'll hate it. It reminded me quite a bit of Caitlin Kiernan and Jean Rhys, so I loved the hell out of it.

Another review complained of the "basil is her soul-mate" sentence up above, which I get; there are a couple of other oddities along those lines, including the Yodaesque, "Almost afraid to move, so shattered she felt."

But for my money they're greatly outnumbered by more lush and beautiful constructions:

--"Handled well, Jasmine thought, a good sharp knife was more useful than beauty."

--"In her bathroom, Careme washed the blood from her face. She watched it curl toward the drain like a red whisper."

While the book is stuffed to the rafters with food, it contains no recipes, at least not ones that require spelling out; Jasmine simply isn't that kind of cook. Just as she isn't that kind of heroine. Her lessons are more organic and pulled together out of the type of knowledge you just can't find in any cookbook. At least not one that's not like this one.

In progress: "How to Cook a Tart" ( 2003)

2011-02-22T11:54:00.001-08:00

Look, I understand that the reviews of this book were less than positive but seriously:

What a disastrous start to the day, Jasmine March though as she stared down at her husband's nubile lover, dead on her kitchen floor.

That's one hell of a first line. Also, someone has written in my nice clean library hardback, in pencil on the flyleaf: "to dip into her consciousness...trading culinary secrets" and I think I'd sleep with them for their beautiful handwriting alone.

Blood Bones and Butter:

2011-02-10T10:01:00.000-08:00

This book looks intriguing, mainly because I am cheerfully ignoring the Anthony Bourdain quote and trying to figure out what the book's about all on my lonesome, but I'm amazed that we're at a place where individual books now require their own websites. If nothing else, the maintenance alone staggers the mind.

Review: Cooking Dirty: Life, Sex, Love and Death in the Kitchen, by Jason Sheehan (2010)

2011-02-06T17:38:00.000-08:00

The problem with hiring mercenaries is this: As management, what you're looking for are guys who can do a tough, ugly job under bad conditions and survive long enough to make a difference. You hope for things like personal leadership, capability under fire, independence, guts. But when you get right down to it, what you're hiring are killers. People who like to kill other people. Staffing a kitchen is not a lot different.

Synopsis: Jason Sheehan was a lifer kitchen dude -- dishwasher, prep cook, expediter, chef -- until he went so crazy that even kitchens wouldn't have him. Then he became a restaurant reviewer.

I love back of the house stories. I really, really love them. Fiction, non-fiction, romance, all of them. That quote up there is true: people working in kitchens are mercenaries of a sort. They're very serious and they're usually very damaged and unhinged. What they aren't are experts at giving life advice. So.

What we have here is 225 pages of fantastic food service memoir and 75 pages where Sheehan attempts to give life advice. This is both good and bad. The food service memoir portion is fantastic: the rise and fall of so many kitchens in so many restaurants, the story of burning out after working too many 16-hour shifts night after night after night and all the substance abuse both those things entail.

As the fry cook narrator says in Lish McBride's Hold Me Closer, Necromancer, "I tried to take some pride where I could. If I was going to be a dropout loser, then I was going to be the best dropout loser." It's a sentiment Sheehan lived wholeheartedly and relives through his storytelling.

There's the Chinese restaurant-cum-gambling parlor in upstate New York; La Cite, the French start-up that ultimately falls to nepotism and linguistic ignorance; a succession of New Mexico diners where Sheehan learns the true meaning of Xmas and hits rock bottom. And all of them are glorious.

As is Sheehan's telling of the roundabout way in which he met, lost, re-met, dated, was threatened by and inspired to keep his wife, Laura. That alone--the story of a fuck-up drug addicted loser who pulls it together enough to woo a woman as equally damaged and driven as he is.

Try falling asleep next to an angry woman who, just a couple hours prior, threatened to stab you with a barbecue fork. That's like taking a nap in the polar-bear cage. While nine times out of ten you might be okay--the bears might just totally ignore you--that tenth time you're going to wake up, open your eyes, and see her there, hovering over you, nose close to your nose, and she's going to say something like, "Do you have any idea how easy it would've been for me to kill you just now?"

Now, here's the part that doesn't work: especially in the earlier parts of the book Sheehan has a tendency to wax philosophical and imparts the World According to Sheehan, and Learn Thou, From My Experiences and it never quite comes together. I'm fairly sure that what the world doesn't need is another random dude telling everyone how to live their lives based on his extensive record of losing jobs and moving back in with his parents.

Wait, wait -- I'm not saying that someone with those experiences doesn't have valuable insight to impart, I'm just saying that Sheehan didn't impart valuable insight so much as those sections sounded forced and uncomfortable. They're sections that lack a tenth of the passion Sheehan brings to the sections where he's talking about working the line or falling in love. They're out of place, as if Sheehan wrote this great memoir and then got back a little note from the editor, "Btw: advice it up a little! Just like Anthony Bourdain!"

But Sheehan's not like Bourdain, a fact he readily admits.

And here's the thing: the kitchen memoir world's big enough for both of them. Gasp, shock, horror, I know, but here me out. I love back-of-the-kitchen memoirs and this one's one of the best.

Dear Gastronomica,

2011-02-01T05:37:00.000-08:00

Your online cart is insecure and your "Contact Us" link is broken. You are thwarting my attempts to purchase a subscription! Don't make me have to tromp around in the snow trying to find some store up here that carries you.

No love,
The Internet

Review: Garden Spells, by Sarah Addison Allen (2008)

2011-01-30T06:00:00.000-08:00

Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen:

The tree was situated toward the back of the lot. It wasn't very tall, but it grew long and sideways. Its limbs stretched out like a dancer's arms and the apples grew at the very ends, as if holding the fruit in its palms. It was a beautiful old tree, the gray bark wrinkled and molting in places. The only grass in the garden was around the tree, stretching about ten feet beyond the reach of its branches, giving the old tree its room.

Claire didn't know why, but every once in a while the tree would actually throw apples, as if bored. When she was young, her bedroom window looked out over the garden. She would sleep with her window open in the summers, and sometimes she would wake in the morning to find one or two apples on the floor.

Claire gave the tree a stern look. Occasionally that worked, making it behave.

Synopsis: Two sisters bring their secrets to the old ancestral home and cause all kinds of magical upheaval in a small North Carolina town.

(Not about food per se, but being fed)

Beach reading. That's what this is, beach reading. It's sunny and light and romantic and...uplifting. This book has not one iota of dark in it, despite the fact that one sister is on the run with her daughter from an abusive, controlling boyfriend, and one's an emotional shut-in. Everyone gets what they want, and moreover, what they need, which is rarely the same thing. There's also a wonderful little old lady wandering around giving people things without knowing why, and eventually she attracts a passel of wistful gay men looking for love. Which is how life should be, I feel.

When Claire Waverly's grandmother died, Claire stepped right into her footsteps and turned the family's magical recipes into a catering business, bringing the people of Bascom fine, gourmet charmed foods. After all, cooking and hiding in the Waverly mansion, tending the magic garden and resolutely refusing to interact with the rest of the world are what Claire does best. Right up until her prodigal sister Sydney returns, bruised and shaken, with her daughter Bay in tow. And then there's the staunchly oblivious, madly in love artist who's moved in next door.

So, I've seen this book listed as culinary fiction on more than a few sites, but for me this isn't a book about food per se, but being fed, and who you let feed you. Technically, there's food everywhere in the book, and yet no one really seems to eat, unless it's narratively important. A nifty trick, but one that wears thin about the middle of the book. It's a good thing that Allen can back up the relatively light weight of the narrative with prose that positively sparkles, leaping right off the page.

This house is haunted in a *good* way.

Review: A Taste for Murder, and A Dash of Death, by Claudia Bishop

2011-01-29T10:09:00.000-08:00

A Taste for Murder by Claudia Bishop:

The statue of the man and his horse had been erected in 1868, two hundred years after the founding of the village. Something had gone awry in the casting process, and the General's face had a wrinkled brow and half-open mouth, leaving him with a permanently pained expression as he sat in the saddle. On occasion, roving hordes of Cornell students on spring break heaped boxes of hemorrhoid remedies at the statue's base, which sent the mayor into fits. Most years the statue sat detritus-free, except for the six-foot heap of cobble stones piled at the foot and used to crush the witch each year.

Synopsis: Innkeeper Sarah Quilliam and her sister must find out who ruined History Days for the town of Hemlock Falls, NY, when an unpleasant guest from the inn is squashed flat in front of a cast of thousands.

Earlier this year I read (and loved) Toast Mortem, the 16th entry in the Hemlock Falls mystery series. I'd tried, years ago, to get into this series and hated it, but have since revised my stance, based on that one book. That's right: I was wrong. I really dig this series.

The Quilliam sisters, Sarah and Meg, run the Inn at Hemlock Falls, a tiny town in upstate New York with a quirky cast of tens. Sarah, the innkeeper, sits on the City Council and is frequently pressganged into volunteering by the other council members. Case in point: she winds up volunteered to get squashed flat at the upcoming History Days, a festival that culminates in the re-enactment of Hemlock Falls' witch-hatin' days. Good call, City Council!

However, Sarah neatly ducks out of it by wrangling in an unpleasant guest who used to be a singing hot dog and now may or may not know who embezzled $300K from the hot dog people. On the day of the big event, however, it's the guest and not her ersatz mannequin who is squashed flat by the bloodthirsty re-enactors of Hemlock Falls. Enter Sarah and, when she's not busy throwing things at passersby, her chef sister Meg, who jump on solving the case.

It's not a bad book at all. I think my quibble with it the first time around is that the City Council members are just so darn mean to Sarah and she just sits there and takes it, which drove me crazy. Now, much less so. And, as a bonus, I totally did not remember I'd read this whole book through, so the ending came as a total surprise YET AGAIN. Three cheers for memory loss, y'all.

Berkley Prime Crime has released the first four books in the Hemlock Falls mystery series as two trade-paperback sized volumes which I am inordinately fond of. They have a nice heft to them, and prop up well on pillows. So of course I kept on reading, A Dash of Death, the second mystery in the series. Which I'd never read.

Okay in point of fact I stayed up til 5am reading it, because I couldn't put it down. So good. It really feels like there's a jump in quality from book 1 to book 2, and I just plopped down with the dogs and read it all the way through. Phenomenally good, even though this time I did guess the murderer correctly about a quarter of the way through.

Of the plot to the second one, I am simply going to leave you with the following quote from the book:

Quill found her patience wearing thin. "Harvey, if the town really insists on doing this, don't you think we should open it to little boys, too?" Neither man looked at her, which told Quill they'd discussed the possibility that she would bring it up.

"Women's lib," said Elmer. "Well, I guess we got to consider you feminists. Now, I'm all for women's lib, Quill, or should I say -- (this with heavy jocularity) -- "Ms. Quilliam, but I don't know as how we could get the town to support a beauty contest for boys. Now, if we had a category like Best Little Fisherman, or Best Little, I dunno, some more boy-like thing..."

"Best Little Bow Hunter?" Quill heard herself say. "Best Little Sport with a Shotgun? Best little penis?"

"Oh, my God," said Elmer.

"It's the gunshot wound," said Harvey. "Saw a lot of it with 'Nam."

"Harvey, you were never in 'Nam," said Elmer, "not even close."

"I didn't say 'in' 'Nam, I said 'with' 'Nam."

"Ayuh. You know what you need, Quill? A nice cup of coffee or something."

Quill went into the kitchen to get a nice cup of coffee or something.

"I'm losing it," she told her sister. "It's the gallery business all over again. One-way trips to remote mountain areas are starting to look attractive."

"Explain," said Meg.

Meg demonstrated the proper degree of outrage over the Little Miss Hemlock Falls Beauty Contest, loyally endorsed Quill's proposed category, and immediately began preparing cappuccino as a restorative.

It goes without saying that both books pass the Bechdel Test with flying colors. It's like if Elizabeth Bowen had taken up writing mysteries. And if that doesn't convince you, nothing will.

Lavender Lies, by Susan Wittig Albert (2000)

2011-01-29T10:07:00.000-08:00

Lavender Lies by Susan Wittig Albert:

We settled ourselves in the wicker chairs, and I glanced around. The porch might have been a set for a 1930s movie, with an old oak icebox standing against one wall and a bench with a white enameled bucket and wash basin on the other, an embroidered hopsacking towel hanging above it. The painted floor was covered with a worn braid rug, on which lay several napping cats, like orange and white and gray dust mops.

Synopsis: Herbalist/sleuth China Bayles has six days to get her wedding to MacQuaid organized, and the dead real estate agent really isn't helping things.

So inconsiderate.

Man, I am just never going to read these in anything resembling the right order.

Unlike the Travis McGee stories (still hunting that Quick Red Fox and he's damn quick, let me tell you) and the Agent Pendergast books, which I maintain a religious zeal for reading in order, I keep stumbling across these China Bayles mysteries and going hey, that cover looks awesome, gimme. This one's butter-yellow with lavender blossoms on, one of my favorite color combos ever.

Shallow browser, thy name is oddmonster.

This book actually follows the last one I read, Chile Death, like directly, and once I figured that out it was kind of surprising and a little disjointed, like I had to remember the events of the book she was talking about. I think I like my way better.

Anyway, usually I hate wedding stories. Hate them with a passion (yes, I basically had to be kidnapped to attend my own wedding)(although I did get a boat ride out of it) but this one's kind of awesome. Basically, China's not a huge fan of getting hitched but you know, she's willing, and then bam! murder.

It's kind of awesome. Her best friend and matron of honor, Ruby, decides they should solve the murder themselves while organizing the last of the wedding. As you do.

The real charm of these stories lies in the sheer amount of detail Albert puts into describing Pecan Springs, TX, in all its glory. And it is glorious. At one point, she pauses after Bayles has just found body #2 to do a one-page digression on Texas geology. Which is fabulous. I learned something!

Now, there was one drawback to the book.

SPOILERPANTS ARE LOOKING SHARP IN SEQUINS, BITCHES. SO SHARP YOU CUT YOURSELF ON THE BIG SEQUINED SPOILERPANTS.

The solution to the mystery ultimately lies in the discovery of a custodial kidnapping, ie a case where one partner kidnaps their own child against court orders. And the way this is laid out is that the mother who has been diligently searching for her daughter for ten years quietly comes into the nursery and quietly lays out her cards, that her daughter is in town and she now needs to approach the custodian and his wife without undue trauma to her child, etc, and China then turns around and basically calls a town conference to announce OMG MELISSA IS A KIDNAP VICTIM AND HER DAD'S THE KIDNAPPER HOLY BACON IF THIS IS TRUE!

Um, as far as I can tell, that's basically the last thing you want someone to do when you're trying to approach a kidnapper who's been sprinting paranoically from city to city to keep your daughter away. So I did sort of feel China needed a slap there. Or better yet, I just wish the concept had been addressed in the text, as in describing the fallout of China's actions, or even the potential fallout so that the book could present the situation in a way that would be educational or god forbid, helpful.

I know! I want helpful with my fiction, even when it gallops merrily past the Bechdel Test with flying colors. I'm incorrigible.

Overall, a good read with some a minor annoyance near the end. I'll definitely keep reading this series. I think there's one with a blue cover over on the shelves somewhere.

Review: Toast Mortem, by Claudia Bishop (2010)

2011-01-29T10:05:00.000-08:00

Toast Mortem by Claudia Bishop:

Adela chaired the library board. Just as John Deere bulldozers were good at moving dirt, Adela was good at fund-raising. So the library was a pleasant, well-ordered place with good lighting, lots of books, and up to date computer equipment.

Synopsis: Simply the best culinary mystery I've ever read.

(Snark! Mayhem! Cats! And a computer-savvy kickass librarian!)

I've seen lots of articles puzzling over the popularity of cozy mysteries, those mysteries where the main character is usually a woman employed in a domestic or semi-domestic sphere, who negotiates between that and the world of crime-solving due to unforeseen necessity. And I think I have the answer: these books all* pass the Bechdel test with flying colors. The protagonist usually has a female sidekick with whom she banters back and forth about the crime. If there's a romantic subplot, it takes a backseat to solving the mystery.

And Toast Mortem, in addition to having a really fabulous title (no I can't explain the popularity of puns in cozies) is an outstanding cozy.

The Qwilliam sisters' upstate New York inn is threatened by the establishment of a culinary school right next door, whose famous French chef holds a grudge. In between deflecting his unfunny practical jokes and trying to keep the city council from killing each other, Qwill, the innkeeper, must also find time to raise her son, Jack, put up with air-heads at the front desk, and stop her chef-sister Meg from throwing frying pans at people. And what's the deep dark secret their pastry chef is protecting?

Cue more mayhem.

And it's glorious.

The town of Hemlock Falls is adorably quirky and better yet, well delineated, with the various tangled relationships between the characters adroitly managed. The Qwilliam sisters are fantastic: Qwill, the pragmatic worrier is the perfect foil for her hot tempered and snark-mouthed sister Meg. The front desk airheads are hilarious. Things fall apart in deliciously ghastly ways and the characters respond to situations in ways I could definitely relate to.

Well-written, interesting loopy plot, passes the Bechdel test, and features both placeporn and madcap good times (did I mention I love madcap? I love madcap).

Plus there's a librarian who manages to be neither a bunned spinster** or a flowing-locked sexpot, but an intelligent and savvy individual who's amazingly good at her job. Bonus.

For a culinary mystery, it's not very food-oriented so much as it is kitchen-oriented, as in the focus remains squarely on what it's like to work in a kitchen, making all the food people squee over. The included recipes are kind of terrible, but that's also a plot point, so I'll let it pass.

Strong contender for book of the year.

*A Rose From the Dead passed, but only by the skin of its teeth. I had to go get the book back to check.
**which is fine but come on. Work with stereotypes if you've got 'em

Review: Sprinkle with Murder, by Jenn McKinlay (2010)

2011-01-29T10:03:00.000-08:00

Sprinkle with Murder by Jenn McKinlay:

"Mom, is this another ploy of yours to push Tate and me together?"

"Now why would you ask a thing like that?"

"Because two weeks ago, you locked us in the walk-in cooler in the bakery, and we almost froze to death because you thought a near-death experience might bring us to our senses about our feelings for each other. Or does that little episode not ring a bell?"

"I should have left you in for five more minutes."

"Mom!"

Synopsis: The best culinary mystery I nearly didn't read.

Even the recipes rocked.

Now, I really liked this book, even though the first five pages are really, really rough. I mean sanding the door down before painting it rough. The rhythm of the language is very staccato, some of the paragraphs are a little disjointed, and who owns the POV is difficult to establish. Being that I have the attention span of a ferret with a pixy stick, I idly flipped to the back to read the author's blurb. I love author blurbs. They tell you so much: how paranoid an author is about their real identity or other pseudonyms, whether or not they live in the place they're writing about, how seriously they take themselves. And author photos are the bomb. Again with the wealth of information*.

Jenn McKinlay's author blurb begins: "Jenn McKinlay is a dessert freakasaurus. She has been known to eat leftover birthday cake for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and the frozen top tier of her wedding cake didn't stand a chance of seeing its first anniversary."

And I thought, Jenn, I am with you. I will get through your book. And I picked up where I left off.

Which is fortunate, because this book rocks. The characters are well-drawn and interesting, they interact well, they exhibit poor decision-making skills and compassion at the same time, the writing smooths out** and the mystery is mysterious without being overly complicated or draggy.

Childhood pals Angie and Mel open a cupcake bakery in Scottsdale, AZ, with the backing of their other childhood friend, Tate. Hence it's a no-brainer that the bakery will provide cupcakes for Tate's wedding, even if it's to Christie the bridezilla. They send over some samples for her to try, but when she provides no feedback, Mel goes over to her studio and finds the bride totally dead with a cupcake clutched in her talons. Cue the mayhem.

Mel is of course, the primary suspect. This is complicated by her Uncle Stan being on the Scottsdale PD force and Angie's brother Joe being an ADA. Also, her mother painted her bathroom bright orange and the baker across town is hopping mad at being cut out of cupcakes and is stalking the store in a bright pink van. Tate has issues. Angie has issues. Mel's mother has a subscription. Despite all this, at no point does Mel describe herself in terms of extreme narcissistic self-love, and she and Angie keep right on running a bakery while trying to solve the crime and clear Mel's name.

The ending felt a little hm..., but at the same time totally plausible. You really don't know all your neighbors secrets, nor should you.

Will definitely be picking up the sequel.

*For instance, even if you never read Richard Kadrey's Butcher Bird, you should totally check out the author photo. It speaks volumes.
**No, not like the top of a well-frosted cupcake. Give me some credit, I'm not a complete hack.

Review: Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter, by Phoebe Damrosch (2008)

2011-01-29T10:02:00.001-08:00

Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter by Phoebe Damrosch:

The gentleman on table twenty-three plans to propose and has arranged for us to deliver a Faberge egg at the end of their meal. Proposals are nerve-racking for everyone involved. While terrified lovers contemplate eternity in sickness, poverty, death, or worse, equally anxious servers imagine ruining what might be the high point of these people's lives together, before the bankruptcy, the Botox, and his affair with the life coach.

Synopsis: Vermont foodie girl in NYC discovers joy of restaurant work, four-star food. Falls in love. Writes good book.

At the start of the book, Damrosch is living in the Williamsburg section of NYC, working at a cafe, pining for her downstairs neighbor and making fun of hipsters. In other words, she's a hipster. This does not make her immediately likeable, but it makes for a vivid and wholistic setting, during which you can settle in and discover that Damrosch really knows how to write.

Then she quits her job (and her downstairs neighbor quits her), moves to a different part of NYC and applies for a job at a new four-star restaurant. But this is no ordinary restaurant. In order to successfully keep her job, Damrosch has to attend all-day courses given by the various chefs and sommeliers, memorize long lists of information about not just food but silverware, table linens and Central Park, and then pass tests on those things, just to serve on the floor.

But here's where it gets interesting: in describing this whole process, Damrosch demonstrates she's the perfect candidate for the job because she's batshit insane for food. All food. Any kind of food. She loves the research, she loves the learning, she loves the eating. And that made the book for me.

It was just like if someone came up to me tomorrow and offered me a job whose requirements were that I had to help people read books, and in order to do that, I had to study books intensely: font-faces, paper weight, binding techniques, ink colors, the Dewey Decimal System, biographies, fiction, genre fiction, new releases, reprints and everything in between. I'd be perfect for that job because I am batshit insane on this one particular subject. That's pretty much what happened to Damrosch with food.

The inner workings of Per Se, the restaurant in question, weren't terribly exciting, but Damrosch is a good writer and keeps you briskly moving with how tightly focused she is on food and oh yeah, there's a love story, which I didn't think I'd like nearly as much as I did, considering I have a cold, black cynical heart. But I really enjoyed it.

It's not a perfect book, by any stretch of the imagination--there's a little too much But What About Me navel-gazing where I was sorely tempted to think, "Oh, look. It's Sex and the Kitchy...en." But I didn't, partly because things never get that bad in the story, but mostly because that pun doesn't work. There's a sort of First World privileged gaze going on that was a little hard to stomach, but that's part and parcel of the sort of dining you start talking about with four-star restaurants. Besides, as Damrosch puts it:

We spent money on two things: food and something we soon named 'everyday luxury'. Under this heading fell things like eight-dollar toothpaste. Yes, toothpaste can be had for a quarter of that, but we decided that if it increased our love of life at least twice a day, it was worth it.

It's a hard attitude to swallow during some portions of the book, but Damrosch at least owns up to her privilege and defends it: this is her crazy. This is who she is. This is equivalent to having a house with more than 5,000 books in it. Everyone has their own priorities.

Overall, it's a better memoir than most, but will really only excite people with a serious bent for food and restaurant reading.

And I'm sure I have a couple books like that around here somewhere.

Review: Town in a Blueberry Jam, by B.B. Haywood (2010)

2011-01-29T10:00:00.000-08:00

Town in a Blueberry Jam by B. B. Haywood:

But the fact remained that Sapphire Vine was dead. Someone had killed her. And though Candy found it not only absurd but also literally painful to think that Herr Georg could have plunged a hammer into the back of Sapphire's head (not to mention how painful it must have been for Sapphire herself) the fact remained that he had an excellent motive for doing just that.

Synopsis: Debut of yet another culinary mystery series, this time set on a blueberry farm in Maine, but with bonus "if it weren't for you meddling" middle-aged divorcees speech and deus ex homine handsome.

Does anyone here really investigate their friends and neighbors?

By now I think we are all familiar with the setup: girl with awesome big-city career and husband determines Something's Missing and chucks both items to move back to a smalltown with a family connection and open some type of foodery, where she finds her true calling and oh yeah, a bushel of dead bodies.

Now, if I was the police chief in a small town, I think I'd be watching very carefully to see if any women fitting that description moved in, because they're like the barometer for a murderstorm.

Candy Holliday (please note: everyone in this book has a fairly awesome name. Sapphire Vine, Herr Georg, Judicious F.P. Bosworth, Jock Larson. Work with me.) has moved to a blueberry farm in Cape Willington, Maine with her aging father (Doc...Holliday. See, I told you.) and that right there would be your cue for a homicidal maniac to take over the town. Aging playboy Jock Larson falls suspiciously over a cliff! Gossip columnist Sapphire Vine is blunt-trauma'd in the back of the head! And our girl Candy's immediately on the case.

Lo does she investigate. She investigates so much and so well, in fact, that the police chief of Cape Willington goes from being horrified by her actions (breaking into a crime scene and yoinking key evidence, for a start) to offering her a job at the end of the book. And frankly, I cannot tell you the number of times that has happened to me.

Now, despite all the piss-taking in this review, I do have to say: this is a pretty fun book. It's easy and sunny and likeable. Candy is not wholly terrible and not wholly likeable. Her motivations are sometimes murky, and she's kind of officious and awkward at times, making her both complicated and interesting.

She has a best friend/sidekick who basically steals the book with her one-liners and her sass and her random tearing-aboutness, and I kind of want the two of them to scandalize their town by getting together like the women in Jae's Second Nature but without the werewolf thing.

There were, however, two things that got up my nose.

(Only two, you ask? I know. I feel like I am growing as person.)

Thing the First: There seems to be a terrible trope in these books where the author takes a moment for the heroine to describe herself in detail. And the details are always glowing and the heroine always looks way better than any mortal has a right to look. To wit:

The sun had added some color to her high, full cheekbones this summer and a touch of rosemary honey to the tips of her hair. It contrasted nicely with her eyes, which were a light shade of blue but bright--"the color of forget-me-nots in spring" her mother used to say.

Okay, am I the only person who has never thought of their hair in terms of whether it looks like it's been dipped in honey or not?

Dear authors,

Please stop doing that.

Thank you.

Thing the Second: During the book's thrilling conclusion (which I am not going to spoil for you because it was both thrilling and kind of kick-ass) there's a moment where you think that Candy and her sidekick are about to be saved by the town's Awesomely Handsome Man. They are not, in fact, which is fantastic, but then afterwards they both make a point of going up to said man and cooing at him repeatedly how wonderful it was that he saved them. Um, no. No. That is twaddle on a particularly poky stick. I do not want that.

Overall, though, the book's a darn good read, and I'll definitely be stalking the library for the second in the series, Town in a Lobster Stew.

Review: Coffee to Die For, by Linda French

2011-01-29T09:58:00.000-08:00

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*

Review: Oolong Dead, by Laura Childs (2010)

2011-01-29T09:56:00.000-08:00

Oolong Dead by Laura Childs:

Delaine slid into a chair across from Theodosia, then reached out and grabbed one of Theodosia's hands. "I've been so worried, Theo! There we were, having a perfectly lovely high-society event. And you go and stumble upon that poor woman's dead body!"

Synopsis: While riding steeplechase, Theodosia Browning is thrown from a horse and lands next to the murdered body of her ex-boyfriend's sister. And then my suspension of disbelief falls off its tightrope and breaks its dear Aunt Fanny.

Next I suppose you'll tell me the police ask her to investi--

Oh. My. Stars.

There are good things and there are less good things about this book. I think it's just going to be easiest if I revert to a list-style entry and then tally everything up at the end.

GOOD!

I love these characters. Like, a lot. I love the tension between them, the bickering, the bantering, the deep currents of friendship and workship and crazy between them all.
I admit it. Delaine's growing on me. I no longer want the next book to involve finding her body in a swamp.
Jory Davis, Theodosia's stylish ex with a streak of tool a mile wide IS BACK. Parker, you're on notice, buddy. On the plus side, Drayton's still available and looking.
Jory's new flame, Beth Ann? Is a BRILLIANT character. She's just tragically failtastic. I so want her to stick around and be terrible to Theodosia. I know that makes me a bad person but look:
Beth Ann held out a champagne flute and waggled it to no one in particular. "Beth Ann would like another drink. Beth Ann is thirsty."

"Beth Ann's from New York," said Jory, as if that explained everything.
I KNOW. \m/ She is so terrible she whips right back round the other side to AWESOME. Book #11 in the series hopefully involves some type of cage match. (Fingers crossed!)
In all seriousness, I really, really enjoy Childs' writing style. It is somehow both deeply, incredibly detailed while also being flowing and smooth and fast, and this makes even a bad plot very enjoyable.

LESS GOOD!

This is a bad plot. It's convoluted and there's some drag in the middle, and Theo veers towards Mary Suedom. The the classic two-men-fight-over-heroine schtick veers Theo dangerously toward Mary Sue territory. However, yet more bonus points for the hilariously tragic Beth Ann. She sort of stole the book for me.
Look, in what world is the lead homicide investigator assigned to the case going to sit one of the suspects down and go um hey, 'sup? So, the victim's family want me to file murder charges against you, so here's what I wanchu ta do: go interview the victim's family and see what you can find out.
Is it the same world where the victim's sister (the victim HATED Theo, just as an aside) demands she help find the killer as well?
There's a random jet-ski scene where Theo assaults someone and I did not feel it was justified.
I have noticed a strong increase in the number of brand names mentioned in the last few books. It's not that someone is carjacked, it's that they're ripped from their CADILLAC ESCALADE. It's not that the victim liked designer jewelry, it's exactly what brands she liked. And in the book before this there's a scene where Theo's getting ready to go out that is so branded that I think I can recreate her look from here. I dunno. It feels cheesy somehow.
The very very end, very last page? Veered even closer toward Mary Sue territory. I will be watching this series very closely for that from now on.

Overall: Eh. B-minus. A tea-shop mystery with big plot holes is still a tea-shop mystery.

Review: The Silver Needle Murder, by Laura Childs (2009)

2011-01-29T09:54:00.000-08:00

The Silver Needle Murder by Laura Childs:

Delaine took in their little exchange. "I was going to flirt with C.W. myself tonight, honey. But it looks like you made a mighty big impression on him."

"Not my intention," whispered Theodosia. "Especially when Parker is hovering in the kitchen and there are sharp knives all around."

Delaine gave a little shiver. "There's nothing like having two men fight over you. So romantic and thrilling. Reminds me of earlier times when men actually fought duels over women." She got a dreamy, faraway look in her eyes. "Gee, those were good times."

"Not for the men they weren't," replied Theodosia.

Synopsis: Charleston goes Hollywood by hosting their own film festival. Hands up if you know why that's a terrible idea.

(Note: There's a book in the series between this one and Blood Orange Brewing, Dragonwell Dead, which is possibly my favorite in the series. So we're skipping a little ahead here.)

As Detective Tidwell so succinctly puts it: "The images of two people made enormous by a rear screen projection. Five hundred witnesses in the audience. Yet no one can identify the killer."

During the kick-off to Charleston's first annual film festival, a big-name Hollywood director is shot and killed (see above), and as one of the suspects is the granddaughter of a dear friend, tea shop proprietor and dead body magnet Theodosia Browning agrees to investigate.

I'm sure you can imagine what happens next. Sneaking into crime scenes! Recovering vital evidence! Being attacked by unseen predators! Eliminating suspects! Running a tea shop!

Seriously, I continue to really like that Theodosia busts her buns with making her business a success, and that's skillfully worked into the plot. With only three people running a busy eatery, it is really hard to hair around investigating, and Theo gets that. It does help that all her suspects drop by the tea shop on a regular basis, but that too makes sense.

The plot's kind of odd, and a little thin in places, but the quality of the writing is high, which makes me forgive quite a bit. It does not make me forgive the contrived ending, however, where Theodosia pulls facts about South Carolina out of her ass to put two and two together and then has to out-cop a cop. That...there's strained credibility, and then there's my eyes rolling back in my head with a merry clink.

However, as long as you're not a stickler about such things, and enjoy incredibly detailed settings and lush writing, you'll enjoy this book, whether as a standalone or as a solid entry in the series as a whole.

SPOILERS BELOW; HAPPY SPOILING DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN; SPOILERS!

There is also a Grade A all-out *clever* body-discovery scene that I thought was truly jaw-dropping. To wit, during the red-carpet awards night party, there is a long, long buffet box filled to the brim with ice and seafood, which--points right there for imagery--but then as Theo pulls out a crab claw, she brings up a human hand with it.

Sure, it made no sense plotwise as far as why the killer wanted the body discovered in such a manner or, you know, how they managed to get it there under the eyes of all the caterers and guests, but it was indeed, ART.

Review: Blood Orange Brewing, by Laura Childs (2007)

2011-01-29T09:52:00.001-08:00

Blood Orange Brewing - Laura Childs:

"Fascinating," declared Theodosia Browning as her quizzical blue eyes roved about the hexagon-shaped room. Packed with antique medical instruments, colorful jars, and old anatomical charts, the tucked-away alcove must have been the old surgical suite back when this Victorian-style Charleston home had been a hospital almost a century and a half ago, Theodosia decided. Its builder and owner had made a fortune in early pharmaceuticals and patent drugs. Because, lord, have mercy, she told herself, this is what medical facilities were like in the 1860s.

Synopsis: Tea shop owner Theodosia Browning must deal with a PR nightmare when one of Charleston's most prominent citizens drops dead in the middle of her catering set-up. She investigates and some people die. Others drink tea and have sandwiches.

So here's the skinny on this series:

Theo is one of those independent, business-owning women who happen to trip over dead bodies all the time and yet inexplicably have not been arrested for murder or lost all their friends. In this book, she has to solve two murders and a Dread Conspiracy as well as saving her protege from making a bad business decision, keeping her tea shop open, contributing to the Charleston Heritage Society, and not slapping a fellow business-owner repeatedly about the head and shoulders.

Now, the series as a whole has had its ups and downs--I've reviewed the first six books here, and some were admittedly better than others. This seventh book is not my favorite in the series, one because it features way too much of the horrible other shop owner, Delaine, and two because it clogdances on my animal-harm trigger, so I spent some quality time fanning the pages and skimming with squinty eyes, but I think if you don't have that trigger, you'll enjoy the book very much.

Seriously. I loved the first 221 pages of the book, and then the other 45 I just fanned on. Doesn't make them terrible pages, it just makes me a wiener.

For anyone who's read some of the books in the series, I offer the following observations:

--Damn I miss Jory Davis. He was a really great bf for Theo to have. Sure he was kind of a tool sometimes, but the bad-boy thing was part of his charm. This new fellow, Parker? Is too milquetoast for Theo. She's going to burn through him like fire in a canyon.

--Given my druthers, I want to see Theo end up with Sheriff Tidwell, or better yet, no one at all. She's happy alone, we see that in every book, but Tidwell's a fantastic character. He's never described in terms of physical attractiveness, but Theo admires and respects his brain and work ethic, and in this book, his soul. I'm rooting for Burt to bring home the bacon, so to speak.

--I think few things about this series would give me more pleasure than if Delaine was knocked off in one of the future books. She works every last nerve of mine. And considering I've run into a couple of series where beloved minor characters meet unfortunate ends (Diane Mott Davidson and Margaret Coel, y'all break my heart) why not have a really un-loved one snuff it? Is there a petition I can sign somewhere?

--I really like how crisp the writing is, and moreover, how it doesn't take itself too seriously. To wit:

And...finally...the nasty glint from a jagged piece of metal protruding from the right side of Duke's scrawny neck even as his ruined carotid artery pulsed and pumped a final glut of blood.

---

Maraschino cherry scones and apple muffins emerged from the oven looking golden-brown and smelling delicious.

Boo yah.

--I keep loving how all the shops in the historic district keep changing hands. It's very true to life and keeps bringing us interesting new characters. The district of wee small shops knit together is, as a whole, a huge part of the draw that keeps me reading. It's a devilishly clever conceit that's pulled off with great success.

This is the 7th book in the tea shop mystery series, and I have to say, I'm still reading. I have books 8 and 9 on the headboard, so I'm keeping on keeping on.

Review: The Chocolate Snowman Murders, by JoAnna Carl (2009)

2011-01-29T09:50:00.000-08:00

The Chocolate Snowman Murders by Joanna Carl:

I hit the snowman with twenty pounds of chocolate.

Synopsis: She totally did. Then she had to run screaming through the snow like Jason XI: Jason Freezes His Tail Off.

Life in Warner's Pier isn't much like a box of chocolates at all.

When series heroine and chocolate entrepreneur Lee Woodyard agrees to sit on the board of the Warner's Pier, Michigan Winterfest, she's expecting a little bickering with the other board members and hopefully a lot of great publicity for the chocolate shop she runs with her great aunt. What she gets is, say it with me, a dead body. No scratch that, two dead bodies.

She also gets a mercifully plausible reason for being suspected by the police, and a chance to tell the story in her own uniquely mellow and readable voice.

See, I used to be mighty fond of culinary mysteries, and then as the field saturated, I either burned out on them or just read a whole string of them that sucked it, hard, so I don't read as many as I used to. But I'm a sucker for well-written small towns, for a start, and I have a thing about first-person narratives: they have to be really well done for me to go near them. Weird, right? Well, I do very much like Lee's voice. She's strong and capable and snarky and arrogant and sometimes she's just flat-out wrong, which are all characteristics I find myself empathizing with a great deal. Make of this what you will. :)

The scene in the blockquote is probably my favorite from recent cozy-culinary memory, btw. Lee's lured out to the abandoned conference center at dawn and then chased by a homicidal life-sized snowman over hill and dale. The scene is executed flawlessly, and it's only later, during The Big Reveal, that I realized there is no earthly reason for the murderer to have dressed up like a snowman. I sort of still don't care. It was that much fun of a scene.

But a facile voice can't carry a whole book. Facile doesn't mean artistic or compelling, and luckily this book was only a quarter (yes $0.25 and gods bless my crazy Hannafords used book bin) because it's headed right back out there. Notice that the title and quote are one and the same. That's because really, there were no other sentences in the book that made me perk up and take notice, made me stop and just admire the way the author wrote. It was almost as if oh hey, deadline for the next book's coming up, better take a week and crank this out. Soulless, kind of.

Just like a box of chocolates, I'll read one more from this series and then I'll stop, I swear.

Review: Chile Death, by Susan Wittig Albert (1999)

2011-01-29T09:48:00.000-08:00

Chile Death by Susan Wittig Albert:

"Sure, come on over," shae said, when I reminded her that our morning conversation had been interrupted. "In fact, come for supper. I made potato salad and marinated some chicken. Clyde's gonna put it on the grill so's I can take a load off my tired feet. We won't have a thing in the world to do but sit in the yard and criticize his cooking."

Synopsis: Breezy, sassy culinary mystery featuring the unsinkable China Bayles, this time helping her shot-in-the-line-of-duty boyfriend get out of his depression by assisting when he judges a chili cookoff. Which totally would have worked had someone not dropped dead in the middle of the contest.

When the book begins, China Bayles has been knocked for six, as her longtime companion Mike McQuaid has been shot and paralyzed while chasing bad guys. More than the physical injury, the accompanying depression McQuaid feels at the long road to recovery is threatening the relationship. Good thing life gets complicated.

Chili cookoff. Lottery winnings. Dead body. Nefariousness at the nursing home. Small-town gossip. Unexpected partnerships and new beginnings. Skydiving. Arson. Ranching.

I really look forward to finding these books at the library. They're long, easy reads that function the way cozy mysteries are supposed to: it feels like someone's telling you a story, with all the asides and meanderings that entails. The best parts of life are the asides and the meanderings, I say. The vast majority of the book is written in present tense, which is a darn hard thing to pull off, but China Bayles has the voice to do it. Also, China's such a well-rounded and appealing character that I definitely think of it as her voice, rather than Albert's.

It's that voice plus the straightforwardly meandering storytelling (there is a whole lot of Texas placeporn in this series) that keeps me reading, even when, at one point in this story, in real life China would have gotten the tar beaten out of her for making the choice she did.

This is not real life. This is a cozy mystery. A darn good one.

Review: Death Takes the Cake, by Melinda Wells (2009)

2011-01-29T09:46:00.000-08:00

Death Takes the Cake by Melinda Wells:

Briefly, I wondered if one of the other contestants had tried to kill me but I quashed that thought. It was just too ridiculous. This was a cake contest, with a prize of only $25,000.00. That amount of money meant a great deal to me, but it wasn't one of the million dollar prizes the broadcast networks offered on their reality competitions. We bakers weren't being made to live in jungles, or build our own shelters, or eat revolting things, or let slimy creatures crawl all over us. In my opinion, those people earned the big prizes, and I hoped they'd used some of the cash to pay for therapy.

Synopsis: Della Carmichael, host of a cable network cooking show, agrees to enter a televised cake bake-off at the behest of her producer. Unbeknownst to her, the organizer is a woman who's hated her since college. And who winds up dead in a bowl of cake batter.

See, this is why I don't enter baking contests.

I really wanted to like this book more that I did. I mean I really, really, *really* wanted to like this book. The protagonist is appealing, as is her emotional baggage, and the mystery was well thought-out, and the setting immersive and the supporting characters meaningful. So what happened? Subplot overload is what happened.

Look. It's a wee mystery book, okay? 125 pages in, 125 out, give or take 40. If you add in more than six supporting characters--yes > 6--and give them all drama, and backstory and then try to feed them all into the main plot while still creating an immersive setting, your reader will, like me, throw their hands in the air and pray for the book to end. In other words, skim. Skim skim skim. This book just wanted way too much from me, caring-wise, and thus I am not likely to either reread it or pick up any of the others in the series. Overall, the characterization just wasn't strong enough to carry the load it had been assigned. Meh.

Review: French-Pressed, by Cleo Coyle (2008)

2011-01-29T09:44:00.000-08:00

French Pressed by Cleo Coyle:

"Oh? So now the flatfoot is more than a passing law enforcement fetish? He's potential husband material? And this happened after a month of his not sleeping with you?"
I threw the second shoe.

Synopsis: Please clean up after your love life. Your mother doesn't work here.

There's apparently a new phenomenon in higher education, the "helicopter": the parent or parents who hover over their kid's shoulder as they go through school, doing everything for them, making sure their way is not just clear but paved with diamonds and rose petals, so special are they.

It's sort of a boggling phenomenon to me, but then I encountered this book. Clare Cosi is part-owner and proprietor of a successful West Village coffeehouse, but has a nasty habit of stumbling over murdered corpses. As you do. When her daughter Joy begins sleeping with the older, married chef at her cooking internship, Clare leaps in at every turn to tell Joy how to handle her life, scolding her for her choices, actively trying to break up the couple and then--here's the kicker--confronting the guy and asking him to break up with her daughter.

Then he's killed and Joy's found wailing over the corpse. Good parenting, there.

Apart from the first 100 pages, this book isn't all that bad. It's decently written, there are several intersecting subplots and Clare's messy life is appealing to read about. Eventually she calms down, but basically only dials it back to "light glider". Also, her descriptions of food are somehow unappealing, but the coffee descriptions delicious.

However, for the mother thing, I am handing out the dreaded silver unicorn. It just made me grind my teeth like crazy. However, I was sort of trapped with this book after I'd started it, and Coyle does do a good NYC, I'll give her that.

Review: Biggie and the Fricaseed Fat Man, by Nancy Bell (1997)

2011-01-29T09:41:00.000-08:00

Biggie and the Fricasseed Fat Man by Nancy Bell:

The day it rained feathers in Job's Crossing, J.R. and Rosebud were gathering pecans in the front yard.

Synopsis: In rural Texas, the tiny but imposing Biggie Weatherford does her best to raise up her grandson, J.R., while keeping a handle on everybody else's business. All the murdered bodies, though, make that a bit challenging.

Texas is all kinds of dangerous, it turns out

Good book. Not an awesome book, but a good solid mystery. I'd read an earlier one in the series, Biggie and the Poisoned Politician which was a little better, but still, a quick and solid read. Bell's strength is really her characters, and specifically that each book is narrated by ten-year-old J.R. I think it's hard to write really convincing kids, but J.R.'s voice always sounds spot-on.

Technically a culinary mystery, since it includes one recipe in the back, but as with Politician, it was not the recipe I'd been hoping for.

Review: DUCK, by Poppy Brite (2007)

2011-01-29T09:39:00.000-08:00

D*U*C*K: a tale of men, birds and one's purpose in life by Poppy Z Brite:

Shake knew his family was coming in for dinner, but he hadn't expected their arrival to be heralded by his father's loud and unmelodious voice singing the jingle that had advertised the family's pest control business since 1953. 'Don't let termites cave your WALL IN! Dial five two two six thousand, DAWLIN!'
A few minutes later the hostess ducked into the kitchen, a haunted look in her eye. 'My God, Shake, your dad--I just asked him where I'd heard your family name before, because it's so unusual, and he started, like, bellowing at me--'

Synopsis: Latest in the Liquorverse saga so far, Rickey and G-man take their kitchen crew to Opelousas to prepare 150 wild ducks for Rickey's childhood hero, Bobby Hebert.

Of course I loved it.

Reread. One of the books I turn to when it's 2am and I'm trying to be virtuous and go to sleep and yet failing badly. I love it because it's like a warm bath, these familiar characters in this familiar world, and this sweet story that's part of Rickey and G-man's history together, this swan song to a pre-Katrina New Orleans. I love Rickey and G-man together, being there for each other, but even more so, this book is all crew, about having people around you to count on. Anything more would spoil it, so I'm going to shut up now.

Review: Killer Pancake, by Diane Mott Davidson (1996)

2011-01-29T09:37:00.000-08:00

Killer Pancake by Diane Mott Davidson:

Arch knelt on the kitchen floor and tried to attract the cat. Scout, however, wanted a fresh bag of cat food. This he indicated by standing resolutely next to his bowl, which held only undesirable, four-hour-old food. Receiving no response in the meal department, Scout sauntered across the floor and rolled onto his back.

Synopsis: Catering assistant Julian has his heart broken when his makeup salesgirl girlfriend is mown down by a truck, driven by one of several unscrupulous people involved in makeup espionage. Yes, makeup espionage.

150 pages of pretty darn good, followed by 200 pages of meh. When will I learn?

Meh.

Meh!

Meh.

That is all.

Review: Dying for Chocolate, by Diane Mott Davidson (1993)

2011-01-29T09:27:00.000-08:00

Dying for Chocolate by Diane Mott Davidson:

Schulz shook his head. 'No second golf course, but a dry sailing club. Houses here look like boats. Great big yachts tied up on the grass.'

I looked out at the pale gray and tan mini-mansions sailing past. While the other houses in Aspen Meadow were generally stained dark tones of rustic green and rustic brown, here the palette was light. The magnificent dwellings here were indeed like ships made of pale wood and glass; they perched on waves of mountain grass rolling down from the tops of the surrounding hills.

Synopsis: Caterer Goldy Bear flees her abusive ex-husband's stalking behaviors by taking a summer job as a rich retired couple's live-in cook. With her free hand, she raises money for her son's new school's pool and copes with a dead (new) boyfriend.

Per a discussion in comments from a review of another, later book in this series, Killer Pancake.

This is the book where we pick up Julian, the 18-year-old catering assistant, and in contrast to Killer Pancake, this is a pretty good book. It's a pretty darn good book. And about halfway through, I spotted the reason for this: the earlier books, in contrast to the later ones, feature a lot more placeporn, and I am a sucker for placeporn. In the first three books, Goldy is much more in love with the landscape of Colorado, and describeds it more fully and richly at nearly every turn. In Killer Pancake, a lot of the action takes place in a mall in Denver, which I think really hurt the cause.

Also, there's a lot of genuinely tenseful menace courtesy of The Jerk, Goldy's ex-husband. That man is out of control. And Goldy's responses are so in-character for the situation. She's powerless against his menace because he's got all cards and she's left protecting their son from him.

Overall, I really liked this book. It may be my favorite of the series so far. It's definitely convinced me to read just one more...

Review: Talking Rain, and Steeped in Murder, by Linda French

2011-01-29T09:23:00.000-08:00

Talking Rain by Linda French:

Next noon, under the campus bus shelter, a tiny flutist played a melancholy phrase. She was having trouble with the grace notes and couldn't master their time. Teddy turned up the collar of her brown velvet trenchcoat and stared at the sumptuous purple lining of the flute case. She thought about grace notes, and rainy November days.

Synopsis: A college professor, a knee surgeon, a professional wrestler and a madwoman walk into a bar...

The first of a pair of genuinely intriguing mysteries: first-person POV done well, lots of lovely Seattle-environs placeporn, and scuba diving. If you like mysteries, this does not suck. It's a well-written and enjoyable, very much above-par entrant into the field, of a college professor and her tangled love and family life. Very nice. I think I read it in an hour and a half. Good scuba decription, though.

Steeped in Murder by Linda French:

Teddy glanced up at the sun-kissed Californian. Herb Patchett had the most amazing head of hair for a middle-aged man she had ever seen. Still blond as a beach boy's, the hair was wavy and gorgeous, gleaming with champagne highlights in the sunset. Herb had important hair, executive hair.

Synopsis: Academic politics are lame.

Same series as above, only much less successful. The worries of the lady academic trying to make tenure, when someone offs the chair. Oof, if I had a nickel for every time I found myself in that situation...

Although to be fair, I did not see the murderer's identity coming at all. I'd definitely read another in the series, but I can't say either of these would be a reread.

Review: Chocolate-Dipped Death, by Sammi Carter (2006)

2011-01-29T09:21:00.000-08:00

Chocolate-Dipped Death by Sammi Carter:

Reminding myself that the search for Savannah was more important than staying in my comfort zone. I led Max up the sidewalk. Nod needing a haircut was just the top item on my list. I also didn't need waxing, buffeting, or polishing, nor did I need any part of my anatomy covered with acrylic. I just wanted to find out if Delta knew where to find Savannah.

Synopsis: Cheap, 200-page foodie mystery, set in a small-town candy store.

Eh. Eh.

Eh.

Took me 45 minutes to read. On the one hand, swoopy fast read. And I did appreciate that the author was mean to her protagonist, because you know what? When you're down, and you feel like crap, when you feel like, well, chocolate-dipped death for example, the first people to kick you when you're down will oftentimes be your family. Oh hands up anyone who's never had that happen.

And things get worse from there! So go Sammi Carter for poking her protagonist with a stick. You open your mouth and snark off, your family and friends will turn on you.

At the same time, about 75 pages in, this book took a huge nosedive and started sucking. Which frankly, I blame on editing, not writing. Someone should have taken the plot in hand and returned it to the author to fix, because the first 75 pages are really, really good, so you know she can write.

Poor editing, dude. It's avoidable.