Genre: Mystery
Trade Paperback; Digital Book
ISBN #: 9780999068823
Cinnamon & Sugar Press
269 Pages
$8.99; $.99 Amazon
June 2, 2020
⭐⭐⭐
One glass of cheap California chardonnay cost Emory Gosser Martinez her husband, her job, and her best friend. Unfortunately, that was only the beginning of her troubles.
Distraught after discovering the betrayal by her husband and best friend, Tori, cupcake caterer Emory Martinez allows her temper to flare. Several people witness her very public altercation with her ex-friend. To make matters worse, Tori exacts her revenge by posting a fake photo of Emory in a compromising situation, which goes viral on social media. When Tori is found murdered, all signs point to Emory being the prime suspect.
With the police investigation focused on gathering evidence to convict her, Emory must prove her innocence while whipping up batches of cupcakes and buttercream. Delving into the past of her murdered ex-friend, she finds other people had reasons to want Tori dead, including Emory's own husband. Can she find the killer, or will the clues sprinkled around the investigation point the police back to her?
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Emory Martinez wakes up in her bathroom with a hangover, not even knowing how she got there, after a night out with her best friend Tori. After finding a hickey on her neck, she's afraid her husband will see it, since he should have been home an hour ago, but his bed is empty. Not able to reach Tori by phone, she bicycles (yes, bicycles) to her apartment, and finds her husband and Tori in a compromising position. After pummeling Tori outside over this, the police arrive and she calls her sister for a ride home.
Her twin sister gives her a ride home and reminds her about a child's birthday party that day that she needs to make a cake for, completely unconcerned about Emory. (More on this later). Then her mother calls about her being humiliated by a photo on Facebook, and Tori looks and sees it's of her and an unknown man. When she can't log into her account to remove the photo, she goes back to Tori (!) for her help - and stumbles over her dead body.
Now the police think she's the main suspect for the murder, but don't have enough to arrest her for it. So Emory tries to find the identity of the man that she was with the night before so that she can figure out why Tori would post that photo, and after finding Randall (do we know his last name?) she realizes that Tori set her up for a fall. It doesn't help that her boss thinks she's trying to blackmail him and fires her, too. So Emory has only one choice: find out who killed Tori so she can get off the hot seat and back to a hot stove...
This is the first in the series, and I thought it would be a nice cozy to pick up. It's not a bad one, it just has a few problems: Emory, the main character, is an accountant, so you'd think she'd have an analytical mind, but she's completely clueless. She allowed her police officer husband to do their own finances, and now she's facing bankruptcy. He's also a serial cheater, and she knew nothing through their seven married years, so this is the person we're looking at to solve a murder.
Now, I tried to give her a pass because her marriage falls apart, she loses her job (which I didn't understand why that happened, since it made no sense to do that to her), and then she's accused of murder. It's a lot to take in, but Emory has trouble figuring it out. I had to wonder how she can concentrate on recipes when she can't even concentrate on conversations with other people.
Then, the day of the murder, her sister Carrie picks her up and is only concerned about herself and Emory making a cake for a kid's birthday party. Her mother takes her cheating husband's side and wants them to get back together, thinking everything Emory does is wrong. (We still don't know how her cake knife was gotten - it was never explained).
Unfortunately, while the writing was fine, the characters, for the most part, fell flat. The only interesting character was Tillie, and we didn't get to spend any time with her. While the book was uninteresting for the first two thirds, toward the end, beginning with her meeting Tillie, is when it picked up, so I'm glad I finished it if for that alone.
The murder was basically solved when the killer admitted everything at the last minute, and Emory never did figure it out herself. For an amateur sleuth, she has no clue -- which isn't surprising. The murderer tells her the truth without provocation on their part. I do like to see the protagonist put the pieces together, but in this case, there wasn't any pieces, and Emory did nothing. So I couldn't give it a high rating just for that alone. However, since it is the first book, I will probably read the next to see if the series improves, and also the characters. There are also quite a few yummy-sounding recipes in the back that I might try myself, so that's a plus.
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