I loved A Good Day to Pie. This is the second in the series featuring pie baker Daisy Ellery. I would suggest reading the first, Magic, Lies, and Deadly Pies, before starting this one. Daisy has magic that she can bake into her pies and she most often uses that skill to kill abusive men.
This time around Daisy has entered a baking contest, apparently like the Great British Bake Off which I've never seen - I've watched enough competitions on the Food Network to get the idea though. It turns out that one of the judges is a man she is supposed to deliver a murder pie to after the contest, which is a bit worrying. It becomes an even bigger problem when the man ends up dead before she can even give him the pie. Now she needs to find out who killed him and whether there is any way the cops might be able to connect Pies...
Our amateur sleuth in Invitation to a Killer is Augusta Hawke, who doesn't seem to actually do much writing. I guess she isn't quite an amateur, she got her PI license after helping solve the case in the first book, which I didn't read. This time around she's at a party hosted by a lobbyist's wife when a celebrated doctor dies. At first, the death is written off as a heart attack, but of course, we're not surprised when it turns out he was murdered. Someone at the party killed him. Was it one of the CIA couple, the lobbyist or his wife, the book publisher, the image consultant, the congressman or his wife? It could even have been the cook or the butler. Augusta decides the police aren't treating the death as the murder it clearly was, so starts investigating on her own.
Augusta is kind of a bland character, but hearing the story (I listened to the audiobook) from...
Always the First to Die has a lot of good components - a category 4 hurricane, an island with no power, and a dilapidated estate. It makes for a very atmospheric novel.
As a teen, Lexi was cast in the now-iconic horror movie Breathless filmed in the Florida Keys at Pinecrest Estate. It’s a summer she’ll never forget: falling in love with the son of the legendary movie director and learning the “curse” of Pinecrest is real when someone dies on set.
Years later, Lexi finds herself racing back to the Keys in the wake of a hurricane to find her daughter who is visiting her grandfather at Pinecrest, the place where her husband died in mysterious circumstances just a year ago. Now Lexi’s life will turn into a real-life horror movie as she reckons with her past and avoids ending up dead.
The story alternates to the present and back to 1998 when Breathless was being filmed. The horror movie theme is...
I assumed I would enjoy The Paper Caper. The main character, Brooklyn, restores books and does paper art and the story is set during a Mark Twain festival. This is the first I've read in the series and maybe that's the problem, maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I knew the characters better.
I love that Brooklyn restores books but I couldn't quite get a hold of her character. This is #16, so presumably she's helped solve at least sixteen murders. But she seems really young and her husband seems to humor her more than take her thoughts on the case seriously. I'm assuming she's seen several dead bodies, but watching a video of a car crash is almost too much for her to handle?
The whodunnit was a bit obvious and therefore disappointing. The twist I was assuming there would be regarding who the killer was just never happened.
Overall, it was just a little too silly. Some...
Magic, Lies, and Deadly Pies is not your typical cozy mystery. Yes, we have an amateur sleuth who is a baker; she has a dog and a couple of potential love interests. But we know who the killer is - Daisy herself. She kills men with magic and pies - but they deserve it. The mystery is who is threatening to expose her.
I liked Daisy - but she does kill people. She's a fabulous baker and a statewide pie contest has some of her attention during the book. She has an adorable trailer she lives in and she wears vintage dresses. For someone in her line of business, she can be a bit trusting.
We learn about halfway through who the blackmailer is, but by then we're invested in seeing how Daisy will solve the problem without crossing any of her lines.
The book has the lightheartedness I expect from a cozy, but it does talk about serious issues...
I loved the setting in Death at High Tide. We have a 1920s hotel that was updated a bit too much in the 70s on a remote island in the Isles of Scilly off the coast of Cornwall. The island can only be reached at low tide and it's off season, so very few people are staying there.
Like any good isolated setting, we have a limited number of people. Evie and her sister, Margot, are our main characters. Evie's husband has recently died, leaving Evie on pretty shaky financial ground. But, there were papers that suggested she may be the owner of the hotel, so Evie and Margot head off, to see the hotel and to get away for a weekend. The sisters are a good pair, opposites who nevertheless support each other when push comes to shove. We've got the husband and wife who own the hotel, a couple of staff, and an older, nosy woman who lives there...
