FINISHED OFF IN FONDANT

A cooking show host’s foray into detection runs into some technical challenges.

Courtney Archer’s latest escapade begins with an apology: The host of Cooking With the Farmer’s Daughter finally admits to her audience that she grew up not on a farm but in an affluent Chicago household. While she waits to see whether her viewers will forgive her ruse, Courtney busies herself on the set of The American Baking Battle, where she serves as celebrity judge. This season’s theme is wedding fare, so it should surprise no one when Courtney stumbles across a corpse in a bridal gown facedown on a multitiered cake. Nor is it a shock when the deceased turns out to be the ex-girlfriend of Courtney’s co-star, Skylar Daily, host of Grocery Store Gambit. And as naturally as dessert follows the main course, the police home in on Skylar as their chief suspect, sending Courtney into full-bore detection mode. Against the best advice of producer Eric Iverson, who Courtney kind of hopes will be her boyfriend, and the more urgent pleas of security chief Drake Nolan, who she also kind of hopes will be her boyfriend, the amateur sleuth questions suspect after suspect, with eminently predictable outcomes. What’s harder to anticipate is the morass of misspellings, malapropisms, and grammatical glitches that confound the reader at every turn. One up-and-coming chef is described as ready “to climb one more rung” on the ladder to success. A stuffy producer “didn’t look stiff or staunchly” after the show wraps. Has computer-generated prose come to the world of cozies?

Seriously.