Books (Reviews)

Louisville, Kentucky – Who’s the turkey with a taste for homicide? So reads the subtitle on Mary Daheim’s Fowl Prey. Publisher’s Weekly referred to it as “light and cozy fare.” Given my experience with the last two “murder mysteries” I barely wanted to crack the wishbone on this one. The subtitle wasn’t helping.

Thankfully, I was pleasantly surprised. Once again we have a protagonist who has nothing really to do with the detecting world. The closest this one comes is having been the childhood sweetheart of a hometown detective, for whom she still harbors a major crush, and more or less pines away hoping he’ll divorce his wife. While off on a vacation with her cousin, our girl discovers the dead body of a local popcorn vendor. She also runs into a group of old high school friends and their friends, who happen to be vacationing at the same spot. She spends the rest of the novel, sneaking around gathering clues (there are actually real clues in this one!), and successively building cases against each of this old gang. She’s smart enough, in a change from the other novels, not to run around tossing off accusations. She’s not quite smart enough to share things she finds with the local police – instead just letting them know about random things she uncovers. In the end she sort of actually figures out whodunit, though not in time to catch the crook. The book wraps up with a gathering of all as she explicates her deductive reasoning, and then heads home.

So this wasn’t a disappointment as mystery books go. There was some suspense, there was a plot, there was some vague background romance, even if more of a fantasy. I enjoyed the read. I only have one criticism as far as the writing itself goes – the author makes the detectives – Canadian police and RCMP – out to be a bit bumbling, and somehow only capable of solving the case with the help of a couple of Americans from the other side of the border, who also, of course, bring in the ex-boyfriend, now-detective’s assistance.

Finally, and not a criticism of the book, but a “why was this one recommended as a food-related mystery” question; there wasn’t a whole lot of food. The protagonist is the owner of a bed and breakfast, but the novel doesn’t take place there, nor do her cooking abilities come into play at any point in the story. Being on vacation, she and her cousin eat out alot, and they talk about eating quite a bit, but not much about the actual food they are having – almost like the author has heard about dishes at fancy restaurants and used their names, but didn’t quite know what they were in order to venture further. There’s a fair amount of discussion about the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, but it’s mostly who’s bringing what and will they solve the case in time to be there for dinner (that, and a dead parakeet seem to be the only connections to both title and subtitle). And, of course, the victim was a vendor of popcorn, though that plays no particular part in the storyline.

Nonetheless, each of these three books has given me things to think about. I guess we’ll have to see if I can do any better?!

New York City – Continuing on with my reading of “first novels” of food related mysteries, I moved on to JoAnna Carl’s The Chocolate Cat Caper. Her name is a pseudonym for a “multipublished mystery writer.” That worried me right off the bat. This is supposed to be a mystery. She, or he, is a writer of mysteries. Why the unwillingness to be associated with this book series? Perhaps there are legal reasons, who knows? But it left me wondering.

The book is definitely a step up from the one I reviewed yesterday. The prose itself is clearer, and written for adults with normal intelligence. There is a plot! There’s even a bit of mystery and suspense. And I didn’t find myself putting it down repeatedly wishing that I didn’t have to pick it up and continue.

Two pet peeves, or one, and a peeve that isn’t a pet. First, the inconsistent use of dialect. For effect, here and there, the dialog is in accented form, e.g., a Texas drawl, but only sometimes. Second, the protagonist has a quirk of saying the wrong, but “similar” sounding word at the end of sentences. It might have been a cute quirk if it popped up only under pressure, but it’s throughout the book, including in casual conversation. The character also always catches herself doing it. And the words aren’t always all that similar. After a bit, it just becomes irritating.

Once again the nutshell version… The manager of a chocolate shop is witness to the death of a client that turns out to be a murder by poisoning. Cyanide in the chocolates that she herself had delivered to the client. In this case, she doesn’t act particularly as a detective, but more as a snoopy witness. Clearly she is trying to make sure that neither she nor her aunt, the owner of the chocolate shop, is accused of the crime, and therefore has a vested interest in being nosey. The story is told from her point of view, and as a reader, we don’t learn anything that she doesn’t, and most of it is either overheard comments, observations, and gossip. A bit comes from interviews with the police detectives, who, rightfully, do all the investigating. Once again, however, the crime isn’t “solved” – rather, on the flimsiest of excuses, the murderer essentially decides to confess to her and take her hostage (for no real apparent reason), a situation from which she is rescued mostly by dumb luck. Once again, the police arrive and wrap things up.

One of the things I want in a murder mystery is mystery. I’d like to have a credible detective, investigator, even a civilian snoop, but credible. And I’d like to get the same clues that they get as they piece together the crime – giving me the opportunity to possibly beat them to the conclusion; or possibly to even be surprised by a turn of events. Both this, and the previous book, basically offer no solid clues to the reader (or the protagonist), and merely have things wind up solved more or less by accident.

Perhaps that’s why JoAnna Carl is a pseudonym…

New York City – I was given advice by someone who supposedly knows about such things. So I took it. I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a novel that has a lot of food and wine in it, but is something in the vein of a thriller, or murder mystery, or crime sort of thingy. You can see it’s not a well formed idea. But her suggestion was that I start by reading some of the “better” food related murder mysteries out there. She gave me a list of three authors, and I picked up the first book in each of their series. I’ve just finished the first one, Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder by Joanne Fluke.

Now, I don’t know Ms. Fluke, though according to the inside cover of the book she was born and raised in a small town in rural Minnesota and now live in Southern California. Various critics expressed such things as perfect comfort read and cleverly-plotted cozy and hard to put down. I’m not entirely clear what a comfort read or a cozy is. I do know that I put the book down. Repeatedly.

To summarize the plot, as best I can determine it… The owner of a cookie store finds the dead body of a friend behind the store. Her brother-in-law, a budding detective on the local small town police force, for unknown reasons, enlists her help as an unofficial investigator. She then proceeds to nose about into the business of anyone connected with the dead man (and a few who aren’t and appear in the book for no apparent reason); one after another, on the flimsiest of evidence, not only assuming that they are each in turn guilty, but bluntly proceeds to accuse them of being guilty. Brother-in-law soon to be promoted seems to spend virtually the entire time sitting in his office catching up on paperwork but not answering his phone. In the end, she uncovers the murderer, not through investigation (as one by one the “clues” that she finds end up having nothing to do with the crime), but because the murderer confesses to her out of the blue while she’s busy accusing someone else of the crime. Brother-in-law arrives in time to put the cuffs on the perpetrator and take the credit.

Beyond the bumbling plot and unnecessary characters, the writing and dialogue seems to be aimed at someone with an IQ equal to the number of chapters in the book (26). Random narrative explicates character facets and background, and local “color,” presumably intended to flesh out the book and create some sort of sense of being there. Instead it does little more than confuse and obscure what there is of a plot. The next book in the series is the Strawberry Shortcake Murder (apparently she expands her cookie business). I somehow doubt I’ll be reading it.

Some additional notes… the book contains quite a few cookie recipes, I didn’t try them out, they sounded good. There is, however, a peculiar scene near the beginning of the book that describes the cookie store owner making coffee for her store. She puts the ground coffee in a bowl, crushes a whole egg or two, shell and all, into it, and adds salt. Then she puts the whole mess into a paper coffee filter and brews the coffee. Someone didn’t do her research, or I’m misreading this passage. I had a vague recollection of this process, but not for filtered coffee. Sure enough, the method is used to brew coffee that uses boiling water – traditionally, where the whole mess is thrown in a pot of boiling water, brewed, and then allowed to settle. Think more or less like clarifying a stock – the whole egg is boiled with everything, it draws the proteins and “trash” to it, and then can be skimmed off or settles out. You might get away with it in a percolator or “vesuvio” type pot (the modern version being a Chemex hourglass pot), where the water is brought to a boil, but even that’d be questionable. The whole idea of the process is to boil the egg with the grounds, not to just pass boiling water through the egg and grounds. It was a method of filtration… if you’re already using a filter, it’s unnecessary. And, in a modern drip coffee maker, the water isn’t hot enough to even coagulate the egg. The salt, by the way, isn’t unusual, and a pinch of salt in with your coffee grounds will help smooth out the bitterness, if you prefer your coffee smoother.