Devi Nair
📱📖 Read on Kindle 📃 369 pages 🏷️ Publisher: One More Chapter First published January 15, 2021 Previously published as Murder on the Menu
I’ll be honest, this one never quite clicked for me. I bowed out at about 18%, somewhere between the ex’s awkward wedding rehearsal and the heroine’s decision to “wing it” as a caterer despite seemingly zero culinary experience. I love a cozy mystery with a quirky amateur sleuth, but here, I couldn’t wrap my head around the setup or buy into the characters.
Jodie “Nosey” Parker felt oddly flat, neither believably ex-police nor convincingly cozy-baker-energy. The nickname “Nosey” is teased but not explained early enough, and when paired with scenes of her consoling her ex instead of detecting anything remotely mysterious, I realized I wasn’t invested in the plot or the people.
Maybe it picks up once the bride vanishes (Goodreads tells me that comes later), but by then, I’d already slipped out of the story. Cozy mysteries can thrive on charm and escapism, but this one leaned a little too hard on quirk without grounding it in emotional sincerity or believability.
Would I recommend it? DNF at 18%. If you love small-town Cornish settings and ex-drama baked into your cozy mysteries, this might work better for you than it did for me. But I need my amateur sleuths to feel at least somewhat believable, or at least self-aware. This one lost me before the mystery could even properly begin.
📱📖 Read on Kindle 📃 369 pages 🏷️ Publisher: One More Chapter First published January 15, 2021 Previously published as Murder on the Menu
I’ll be honest, this one never quite clicked for me. I bowed out at about 18%, somewhere between the ex’s awkward wedding rehearsal and the heroine’s decision to “wing it” as a caterer despite seemingly zero culinary experience. I love a cozy mystery with a quirky amateur sleuth, but here, I couldn’t wrap my head around the setup or buy into the characters.
Jodie “Nosey” Parker felt oddly flat, neither believably ex-police nor convincingly cozy-baker-energy. The nickname “Nosey” is teased but not explained early enough, and when paired with scenes of her consoling her ex instead of detecting anything remotely mysterious, I realized I wasn’t invested in the plot or the people.
Maybe it picks up once the bride vanishes (Goodreads tells me that comes later), but by then, I’d already slipped out of the story. Cozy mysteries can thrive on charm and escapism, but this one leaned a little too hard on quirk without grounding it in emotional sincerity or believability.
Would I recommend it? DNF at 18%. If you love small-town Cornish settings and ex-drama baked into your cozy mysteries, this might work better for you than it did for me. But I need my amateur sleuths to feel at least somewhat believable, or at least self-aware. This one lost me before the mystery could even properly begin.