Genre: Mystery
Hardcover; Trade Paperback; Digital Book
ISBN #" 9781943134298; 9781943134250
Velvet Petal Press
294 Pages
$16.48; $14.95; $4.99 Amazon
August 10, 2020
⭐⭐⭐
With one of their own under suspicion, Pepper and Neil set out to find the real killer. But behind the aloha shirts and cocktail parasols is a blender full of secrets. The centerpiece of the convention is a high-dollar tasting of rums that survived a shipwreck and other disasters, and when a precious bottle vanishes from the crime scene, everyone with a ticket is a suspect.
As Pepper tries to keep the insatiable crowd inebriated and her gregarious dog Astra sober, she finds peril under every palm tree. It seems like everybody's guilty of something. But who's guilty of murder? And can she and Neil find the culprit before they're smacked like the mint in a Mai Tai?
✽✽✽✽✽✽✽✽
Mixologist Pepper Revelle and her fellow bartenders are headed to a convention where rare rums are going to be showcased. When they arrive, everything at first is running smoothly, until Fizz Martin, a famed collector, starts ordering everyone around and makes Luke, another bartender, his lap dog for the day.
When Fizz is found dead in the kitchen by Pepper, Luke is discovered with the murder weapon and is now a suspect in the murder. Then another bartender's father is lead detective on the case, which only confuses matters for everyone. Now Pepper is on the trail of a killer who's trying to frame her friend, and she might just put herself in the frame as the next person on the hit list...
I really wanted to like this book, but it seemed off to me. I just couldn't believe that bartenders - who spend their time doling out drinks and seeing what the aftereffects are on people once they're drunk - would want to do the same. Mixologists today exude professionalism. They don't want to be bartenders forever - they want to write, own companies, etc., and to do this they can't be wasted all the time and lead healthy lifestyles.
All Pepper did was drink and lust after Neil. I found it rather tedious, and also there were other things that bothered me. Why did Neil encourage Pepper to investigate? You'd think he'd know a killer was out there and tell her to stop; and since when do homicide detectives share information with their children? Not very professional, and not believable.
So, in the end, the murderer was pretty easy to discover, but there just wasn't enough mystery and I honestly couldn't get past the point that Pepper and her friends thought the best things in life were in a bottle and find it plausible. Sorry, but three stars for the writing and that's about it.
More on Lucy Lakestone's Books: https://www.fantasticfiction.com/l/lucy-lakestone/
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