Ann S. Marie

Dana Sweet is starting over in the small Canadian town where she lived when she was young. Grandma Rae, the woman who raised her after her parents death, has left Dana her bakery/cafe in her will. After renaming, re-envisioning the cafe and investing her savings to make it a success, Dana is looking forward to running it with her cousin Kathy.

Things get off to a rocky start when an infamous reporter with the local paper is found dead, poisoned with one the cafe’s famous cupcakes. Made worse by the fact that Dana was in his office when the body was found. She seems to be the prime suspect in the man’s death, even though he has run afoul of half the town with his alley cat ethics. If that weren’t enough, someone is trying to scare Dana off, leaving threatening notes and sneaking around her home. She needs to put the clues together before someone else gets hurt and cafe is lost forever.

This was nice start to what promises to be a decent series. The residents in Berry Cove are colorful and quirky. Dana is immediately likable and her eccentric family provides plenty of entertainment. We even have a watch cat, keeping tabs on his mistress and keeping her out of trouble. It does seem like every other Cozy has a cupcake theme, however this is a unique enough idea that it shows great potential.

This review is part of a book spot spotlight originally posted at https://ireadwhatyouwrite.wordpress.com/2016/04/02/a-month-of-cozy-strawberry-cr...… (meer)

A downloaded freebie I thought might find me a new series and be a light, quick, frothy little cozy mystery. At time of writing this review, the kindle edition was still free.

Which it was. Very sweet. Yes, very, very, very sweet. Even when our sweet heroine thought she found the killer and confronted she would tell them how much she understood them yet was "disappointed" in them.

It was a decent read with enough to keep me turning the pages -- but overall I think too sweet for me. I'm not the biggest mystery fan so someone more into cozy mysteries might have a different opinion.

I also did not get a sense of the small town Canadian setting other than it said she moved from NYC to a small Canadian town (residents would say things like "honey child" where the town sounded more like deep south USA).… (meer)