beate251's reviews
414 reviews

Thank you to NetGalley and Beyond Page Publishing for this ARC.

This is book 7 of A Food Blogger Mystery. Hope Early lives in Jefferson, Connecticut with her boyfriend Ethan, dog Bigelow and cat Princess. She is a food blogger and cookbook writer and in her spare time solves murders in her idyllic Hallmark small-town community.

The town is gearing up for Christmas, there is a Snowflake Market and a Jingle Bell Stroll. Then Hope discovers that the Santa, a local man, has been murdered and starts sleuthing though she gets no help from Detective Reid.

This has a huge cast of people that are her family, friends or neighbours, like her sister Claire and her best friend Drew who has a new puppy. Unfortunately, I don't think the mystery was very interesting. Also, I felt like an intruder in a close-knit community I don't know because I haven't read the other six books.

There is a lot going on besides the amateur sleuthing, Hope is a kind of whirlwind who constantly bakes and organises, and I found it kind of unbelievable that her character would be so reckless and get herself into danger so easily.

After the murderer is unmasked, friends and family get together to eat and drink too much mouthwatering food, which is nice, and we get a couple of recipes at the end, but unfortunately the measurements are in imperial only. I liked how Christmassy it all was, but the ending was too sickly sweet for me. 

You might enjoy this book more if you've read the previous books, just for the development of the community relationships, and if you like the Grilled Cheese Mysteries by Linda Reilly, who are very similar.

As it is, it is a nice fluffy holiday read, but the central mystery isn't too taxing or memorable.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster UK for this ARC.

Nancy North, 33, has had a psychotic break and is tryjng to rebuild her life and career as a chef. She moves into a new flat together with her boyfriend Felix, but soon after, her new neighbour Kira Mullan, 23, is found hanged. Nancy doesn't believe it was suicide and insists she was murdered, but without any concrete evidence and taking her precarious mental state into consideration, no one believes her. The police close the case and even worse, Nancy is sectioned due to the lies of her new neighbours and Felix, having to fight tooth and nail to get out again and prove she was right.

In Nicci French's stories the police on the whole do not get a good rep. They are dismissive, bumbling, idiotic and sexist. There is always one exception though. In the Frieda Klein novels it is DCI Malcolm Karlsson. Here it is DI Maud O'Connor who we have first encountered in Has Anyone Seen Charlotte Salter? I loved her there and I love her here. She gets stones thrown in her way at every turn, from her disapproving colleagues to the neighbours of the murdered woman, and she still stoically gathers her evidence and finds the truth, once she has come in contact with Nancy.

This isn't a simple whodunnit but a psychological thriller that examines what happens when it looks like a young woman has committed suicide and the police can't be bothered to investigate properly, especially when they dismiss the concerns of a neighbour purely on the basis of her apparent mentally unstable state and just decide a conclusion without ever doing proper police work.

I found this a hard and uncomfortable read. I refuse to believe that mental hospitals are that awful and that the police are quite that dumb when it comes to mental health. We know bad people exist but to see them in such a concentration of murder, lies, gaslighting, abuse and coercive control was a hard pill to take. I don't think I liked anyone apart from Nancy and Maud. Felix in particular was just wrapped in red flags from head to toe. He gaslit Nancy under the guise of sympathy and care for her but it was the opposite  - he used her mental illness to coercively control her, stalk her and badmouth her to others.  

The ending was realistic in that the wrong people took the credit, the neglectful landlord never got a rap on his fingers and the mental hospital continued to be allowed to mistreat people. This made the ending not very satisfactory to me. I'm glad though that Nancy's persistance paid off, and I really hope we will see Maud again in further cases. She could be the new Frieda Klein - strong, stubborn and doing her own thing, not fitting into any mould. I will read anything with her in it.

This is Frieda Klein novel  8 and last, hurray..

You must read the books in order, they make no sense otherwise.

Slogged my way through this one. The final cat and mouse game between Frieda Klein and Dean Reeve wasn't nearly as thrilling as I wanted it to be. Lots about hidden rivers. Lola was a stupid little girl.

This is Frieda Klein novel 7.

You must read the books in order, they make no sense otherwise.

The one where all her friends get hurt in a copycat case. All this walking along secret London rivers!

This is Frieda Klein novel 6.

You must read the books in order, they make no sense otherwise.

Hanna Docherty case

This is Frieda Klein novel 5.

You must read the books in order, they make no sense otherwise.

Sandy Holland case

This is Frieda Klein novel 4.

You must read the books in order, they make no sense otherwise.

Becky case

This is part of Under the Mistletoe, an Amazon Original Stories of five novellas by American romance authors.

It's not called a mincemeat pie, it's a mince pie!

Mrs Claus's Mincemeat Treats in a Mincemobile that looks like a hot dog van is the most American bastardisation of an inherently British thing, and I am NOT here for it.

Also, too spicy for me. The entire collection is like that and I don't know why. The Valentine's collection was a lot better in that respect, and in general.

Thank you to NetGalley and Quercus Books for this ARC.

The Ionian Escape Hotel in sunny Kefalonia, Greece, welcomes new guests: disgraced actress Miranda Vallance, here to hide, and 82 year old terminally ill Evelyn Chambers, here to scatter the ashes of her dead wife. There is also Leonora Neale who we discover is the Nelly from Nelly's 1983 diary, where Nelly decided to stay in Kefalonia to work on a boat, until heartache forced her to return to the UK. Now she is back with her husband Frank, a celebrity chef who is rumoured to have behaved inappropriately with some female assistants which seems to be an ever so familiar tale right now.

This would be enough on its own but there are chapters dedicated to the receptionist, the office manager, the boss, the bartender and the cleaner, who doesn't even get a name. This is in theory a nice idea but it slows the story down too much and bogs it down with unnecessary side stories that add nothing too interesting.

This is a nice escapist and predictable read about second chances in a gorgeous setting with great landscape and food descriptions. I just wish it had kept to the main protagonists.

This is part of Under the Mistletoe, an Amazon Original Stories of five novellas by American romance authors.

This one was chugging along nicely until the drawn out sex scene at the end, using crude words and just generally being too spicy for me.
 
Also, how do you dream up the names Everleigh Dangerfield and Griffin Brantley? 😂