Cream Puff Murder

Hannah Swenson bk 12

Joanne Fluke

Winter in Lake Eden, Minnesota, is the perfect time to curl up by a cosy fire with something – and someone – sweet. But while bakery owner Hannah Swensen can provide herself with the confections, cuddling will have to take a back seat to sleuthing when her sometime-squeeze becomes a murder suspect…With the launch party of her mother’s novel around the corner, Hannah has a dress to fit into and a date with her sister, Andrea, at Lake Eden’s new health club, Heavenly Bodies. Dragging herself out of bed on a frigid Minnesota morning for exercise, of all things, is bad enough. Discovering a dead body floating in the gym’s Jacuzzi? Okay, that’s worse. Nor does it help that there’s a plate of The Cookie Jar’s very own cream puffs garnishing the murder scene. The fact that they were purchased by none other than Hannah’s part-time flame, Detective Mike Kingston, is simply the icing on what’s shaping up to be one very messy cake…Mike may be the prime suspect in the murder of man-eating bombshell Ronni Ward, but he’s by no means the only one. Ronni, a fitness instructor at both the Sheriff’s department and Heavenly Bodies, made a nasty habit of throwing her own heavenly body at every man, eligible or not, who crossed her path. Plenty of Lake Eden’s ladies won’t miss Ronni, including her ex-fiance’s former girlfriend, the angry mother of one of her would-be conquests, and even the mayor’s wife. Could any of them have wanted her gone badly enough to make it happen? Mike’s recruited Hannah to find out, and, as any suspended, suspected detective would, he’s micromanaging her every step of the way…Between trying to narrow the list of Ronni’s enemies down to fewer than half the town’s female population and resisting the urge to remove Mike from the running by throttling him herself, Hannah has her plate full. Trouble is, when it comes to cookies – and to murder – there’s always room for one more.

REVIEW: For this month’s book club we could read any book in this series. A friend let me a copy of the book she read, not realizing that this is the newest book in the series. I read it, and at times I have to say that at times I had to force myself to read it. It could be because we were still unpacking, I was getting the boys registered for their new school, making sure that the school district had all of my paperwork so that I can start working…okay enough of that.

Having never read or heard of the author I had no expectations. So I started reading, and was enjoying it, until the murder happened and all of the sheriff’s dept was suspended because they all had motives or relationships with her. The sheriff (her brother in law) has his wife (one of her sisters) act as his liaison to Hannah (who isn’t a detective at all) to solve the murder or at least clear his name. Mike the lead the detective, one of Hannah’s love interests (I’ll get to that later) uses Norman, (Hannah’s other love interest), as his liaison, and Hannah’s youngest sister comes home from college to help because her boyfriend, yep you guessed it another officer on the force also suspended, wants Hannah to prove his innocence also.

Okay now for the love triangle, which I have to be honest I still don’t get. She is dating both Norman and Rick, and they both know it, and are okay with it, but both of them want to marry her.

Back to the murder, I still don’t get why she was murdered, and the murderer was well I think that this was a HUGE letdown. This would have been so much better if she had delved a bit deeper into the victim. I also had an issue with all the members of the sheriff’s dept, having her investigate the murder instead of the person that was sent in by the state. Mike is in law enforcement and there is no way that that would have flied in his dept. It was to unbelievable.

On the goodside the recipes in the book are AMAZING, I don’t recommend reading this at night however because you will be hungry.

So after all of this I give this book a 3.75 out of 5. This was also the general concenses of the members of the book club.