Finished Off in Fondant

September 11, 2020

After Courtney Archer kicks off the new season of her cooking show, Cooking with the Farmer's Daughter, confessing that she's not a farmer's daughter, she fears the network will drop her. They may, if she becomes involved in one more murder, so she's assigned a security guard to keep watch over her. It's Courtney's cohost for a baking competition, though, who is in trouble. When Skylar doesn't feel good on set, he returns to his room. Courtney finds him, collapsed in the doorway, covered in blood, with a dead woman draped over a wedding cake in his room. Skylar has a history with the woman, but Courtney is convinced he didn't kill her. She spends her spare time trying to discover who else might have wanted the bride dead. Courtney juggles a murder investigation, her love life, and the TV business in this mystery set in the world of cooking competitions. VERDICT There are few surprises in this second book in the series, following Cobblered to Death. Even the killer is obvious, with no sparks to the standard romantic triangle. The mystery's appeal is solely for foodies who enjoy televised competitions.--Lesa Holstine, Evansville Vanderburgh P.L., IN

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2020
A cooking show host's foray into detection runs into some technical challenges. Courtney Archer's latest escapade begins with an apology: The host of Cooking With the Farmer's Daughter finally admits to her audience that she grew up not on a farm but in an affluent Chicago household. While she waits to see whether her viewers will forgive her ruse, Courtney busies herself on the set of The American Baking Battle, where she serves as celebrity judge. This season's theme is wedding fare, so it should surprise no one when Courtney stumbles across a corpse in a bridal gown facedown on a multitiered cake. Nor is it a shock when the deceased turns out to be the ex-girlfriend of Courtney's co-star, Skylar Daily, host of Grocery Store Gambit. And as naturally as dessert follows the main course, the police home in on Skylar as their chief suspect, sending Courtney into full-bore detection mode. Against the best advice of producer Eric Iverson, who Courtney kind of hopes will be her boyfriend, and the more urgent pleas of security chief Drake Nolan, who she also kind of hopes will be her boyfriend, the amateur sleuth questions suspect after suspect, with eminently predictable outcomes. What's harder to anticipate is the morass of misspellings, malapropisms, and grammatical glitches that confound the reader at every turn. One up-and-coming chef is described as ready "to climb one more rung" on the ladder to success. A stuffy producer "didn't look stiff or staunchly" after the show wraps. Has computer-generated prose come to the world of cozies? Seriously.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.