I really don’t want to write 250 pages about this, but I’ll give it a whirl. This book was fine and the series is fine and I’ll probably keep reading them but they aren’t setting the world on fire, just a cozy mystery series. Goldy Bear is a caterer in somewhere Colorado raising her son, tangling with her abusive ass of an ex-husband, and of course, being also tangled up with people who die under mysterious circumstances.
Tangled is a good word for this book because it’s a bit messy and picks up a few months after the first one, though it’s a little hard to follow how she is dating someone new, though the cop she was, uh, well, tangling with at the end of book one is still a key player. But the way she treats him, I’m not really sure why. Also, this is definitely one of those mystery series you have pretty much zero hope of solving unless you want to take a wild shot into left field as she is one for a twisty turn of epic and farfetched proportions.
The book is pretty dated, in that there is lots of gross chauvinistic behavior that I would be much more annoyed for a modern protagonist to put up with, and I think her mothering of her kiddo is heavy-handed to say the least. Also, I think the fact that she provides recipes is fun, but if you are not a kitchen novice, you probably have made similar enough dishes. I do see how it could be fun to make maybe one of the baked goods and read the books, but I haven’t been that motivated by any recipe yet to give it a whirl. All in all, I find the characters vaguely interesting enough brain candy for these pandemic times, so I’ll get the next from the library and be back here for eeking out another 250 words.
