Fondue or Die by Korina Moss Series: Cheese Shop Mystery #5
Published by St Martin's Paperbacks on October 22, 2024
Genres: Cozy Mystery
Pages: 320
Format: eARC
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The lazy, hazy, dairy days of summer are coming to a close in the Sonoma Valley. . . and so is someone’s life.
The small town of Yarrow Glen’s neighbor, Lockwood, hosts an annual Labor Day weekend bash: Dairy Days. And Willa Bauer and her cheese shop, Curds & Whey, refuse to miss out on the fun. Willa is thrilled to celebrate her favorite thing—she is a cheesemonger after all—and this festival goes all out: butter sculptures, goat races, cheese wheel relays, even a Miss Dairy pageant. Too bad the pageant runner, Nadine, is treating Dairy Days prep like it’s fondue or die and is putting everyone around her on edge. When Willa finds Nadine’s dead body under years’ worth of ceramic milk jugs, the police aren’t sure whether the death was an accident. But fingers are pointing at Willa’s employee, Mrs. Schultz, who steps in to help the pageant after Nadine’s death. Someone wanted Nadine out of the whey, and Willa is going to find out who.
This time around, Willa and her cheese shop employees are spending the weekend in the neighboring town of Lockwood, which is holding its annual Dairy Days festival. Curds & Whey has a booth there, and both Archie and Mrs. Schultz have been roped into helping with the Miss Dairy beauty pageant. The pageant director, Nadine, has has been running the show for years, ends up dead, and Willa and her friends don’t think the local cops are doing a good job with the investigation.
The mystery was good. We have several potential suspects with a variety of motives. There were a couple if twists I didn’t see coming and I didn’t guess who the killer turned out to be.
As always, I enjoy the friendship and banter between Willa, Archie, Baz, and Mrs. Schultz. It was also nice to see Willa working with Detective Heath again. He’s not officially on this case, it’s not his town, but that doesn’t mean he’s not interested in making sure the murderer is found.
And of course, it left me craving cheese. Although I’m a little like Baz and not very adventurous in my choices.
About Korina Moss
KORINA MOSS is the author of the Cheese Shop cozy mystery series set in Sonoma Valley, including the Agatha Award winner of the Best First Novel, Cheddar Off Dead. Her books have been featured in USA Today, PARADE Magazine, Woman’s World Magazine, AARP Magazine, and Fresh Fiction. She loves creating quirky characters who live in idyllic small towns. She grew up on a healthy dose of Nancy Drew and Agatha Christie novels, which developed her passion for solving mysteries and eventually writing her own. She lives in a small New England town with its own share of quirky characters.
Korina is a member of Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America. She blogs on Writers Who Kill.
For the past several years, Korina has been on her own Eat, Pray, Love journey, which seems to have stalled at the Eat phase. When not writing or sampling new cheeses (a perk of the job), she can be found with a new favorite cozy, doing jigsaw puzzles, or discovering new travel destinations. She has an affinity (some might say ‘addiction’) to coffee mugs, loves cats, and can’t pass up a new notebook or journal with all those fresh, empty pages.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges: