The clever cheesemonger scores another triumph. The recipes are an extra treat.
Cheese, chocolate, and murder.
Willa Bauer opened Curds & Whey, a French-themed cheese shop in the Sonoma Valley, two years ago, and now she’s using the former kitchenette as a small cafe serving cheeseboards. As the book opens, she and her staffers—Mrs. Schultz, June, and Archie—are heading over to the grand opening of a new cakery that Archie’s ex-girlfriend Hope has created in the space formerly occupied by a bread bakery. When they arrive, though, Willa is shocked to see the name Chocolate Bliss in the window alongside Hope’s Cakery—that’s the name of the business Willa’s ex-fiancé, Pearce Brenner, and ex–best friend, Riley Stephens, opened together after Pearce dumped Willa nearly 10 years ago and used the engagement ring she threw at him to fund their chocolate business. Duncan, the shop manager, offers the customers free samples of Brenner Rum Crèmes, made with the rum Pearce created. Furious, Willa picks up the cheesecake she’d ordered, and then offers to deliver a box of chocolates destined for A.J. Stringer, the editor of the local paper, that Duncan mixed up with her order. When she goes to the newspaper office, she overhears veteran reporter Deandra telling aggressive newcomer Kevin that she’s quitting the paper because A.J. has been giving him her stories. As it turns out, Kevin eats the chocolates meant for Stringer and is found dead. Since the police can’t even be sure who the poisoned chocolates were meant for, Willa’s involvement makes her boyfriend, Detective Jay Heath, avoid her. Asking questions with the idea of clearing her name, Willa finds several suspects: the disappointed former bread maker; Deandra, who’s unhappy with Kevin; Duncan, who’s furious when Pearce tells him he won’t own the shop he was promised; and the owners of the town’s other candy store.
The clever cheesemonger scores another triumph. The recipes are an extra treat.Pub Date: April 29, 2025
ISBN: 9781250893949
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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