Thursday, September 14, 2017

The Tell-Tale Tarte (A Five-Ingredient Mystery #4)

Author:  Maya Corrigan
Genre:  Mystery

Hardcover; Paperback; Digital Book
ISBN #: 9781432840457; 9781496709172
Kensington Publishing
304 Pages
$26.20; $7.99; $5.99 Amazon
June 27, 2017

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The last thing Val needs in her life is an unsolved murder, especially when the victim, an actor famed for impersonating Edgar Allan Poe, happens to be dressed exactly like her Granddad.  To keep an eye on Granddad, whose latest job takes him to the home of Rick Usher, a local author inspired by Poe, Val gets herself hired as a cook in Rick's House of Usher.  When she discovers the actor wasn't the only one doing an impersonation, separating the innocent from the murderous becomes a real-life horror story.  But Val must decipher a killer's M.O. sooner rather than later...or she can forget about finding poetic justice.

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Val Deniston lives with her grandfather in Bayport, Maryland and runs a cafe in the local fitness club, and does catering on the side.  While helping her friend Bethany search for a wedding dress, they see a man who resembles her grandfather's new look - black coat, beard, tinted glasses - and thinks it might be him.  When the man falls in front of a car, she dashes toward him, relieved her fears were unfounded, but still helping give him CPR.  Unfortunately, no amount of CPR could save the man, still unknown to her and the people nearby.  Later that night she she finds out from her boyfriend Gunnar the man's name - Emmett Flint, an actor in the same troupe as Gunnar.

When Val goes to her latest job, a book club, it's when she's serving dessert that she sees the "noted author" invited is not only not the author, it's her grandfather Don who, for some unknown reason, is impersonating Rick Usher, the author in question.  Rick has made a career of writing in the style of Edgar Allan Poe and has quite a group of followers himself.  But when she questions his assistant Clancy, also attending the dinner, she discovers only that 'Rick' is supposedly hoarse from an ailment and Clancy is answering all questions.

As time progresses it is discovered that Emmett may not have died from natural causes, and Val is worried for her boyfriend Gunnar, who is the main suspect, and also her grandfather, who is now spending time with Rick himself.  So when Val is offered a job catering dinners at Usher's home, she agrees in order to try and find out who killed Emmett and why.  Will there be another murder or will poetic justice prevail?  Val will have to move fast to find the answer...

As a huge Poe fan, I once made a trip to Baltimore just to visit his grave, and own all his books (and wrote an essay on him while in school) so this book was one I was looking forward to reading.  While the plot had interesting points, and I did like the fact we have the murder almost immediately - which is always a nice thing so you aren't subjected to pages and pages of needless detail - it also moved slowly for the first quarter of the book.

Reading further, I was somewhat torn; partly because her grandfather seemed a bit of a con man to me: he used her recipes to get a job writing a food column for the newspaper, and then expects to continue so he can write a cookbook.  This did not endear me to the man, and grandfather or not, she should have set him straight about who gets the credit and where, especially since he's secretive on other things as well.  He seemed more like a "user" than a loving grandfather.  It also seemed like they were nothing more than business partners (and not very equal-sided, either).  As for the relationship between Val and Gunnar, there doesn't seem to be any "oomph" attached.  They just seemed boring when they were talking to each other.

Eventually the suspect list was narrowed down to a select few, and then you have the meat of the story.  Putting it together at the end was interesting, and it all came together nicely at last.  Recommended.

https://www.amazon.com/Tell-Tale-Tarte-Five-Ingredient-Mystery/dp/1496709179/

Goodreads:  https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2124053233

More on Maya Corrigan's Books:  https://www.fantasticfiction.com/c/maya-corrigan/

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