I’ll be side-eyeing Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood from now on. Not Prue though, I have complete faith that she’s probably already gotten away with murder several times.
For the past ten summers six bakers have traveled to a remote estate in Vermont to participate in ‘Bake Week’, one of America’s most popular cooking shows. Grafton is also the childhood home of host and esteemed celebrity baker Betsy Martin. This year something just isn’t right. An unexpected co-host is added. As the competition begins acts of sabotage start small and get progressively bigger, culminating in murder.
This enjoyable cozy mystery is very much ‘the British Baking Show but what if murder?’- Several murders in fact. Betsy Martin is Mary Berry and her co-host Archie is Paul. The six contestants fit the distinct reality molds. There’s the young one, the grandmotherly one, the food scientist, the instinctive baker, etc. Each chapter cycles through contestants as well as Betsy’s point of view so that the reader really gets the impression of wrongness from the beginning. A regular reader of mysteries could probably guess the twists as they come but I was genuinely shocked at a few points towards the end. It’s a quick read so not that hard to suspend your inner Poirot and just zoom along with the contestants. I’ve also just heard that Hulu is developing this into a series which is unsurprising. I definitely recommend this to lovers of baking, reality television, and karma coming to bite people in the butt.
