Fast read. Familiar characters in a familiar setting. One new unique individual added. Unfortunately, I had the culprits figured out midway through the book. ( )

The Chocolate Clown Corpse is the 14th book in the A Chocolate Mystery series.

The building next to TenHuis Chocolade is for sale and Lee thinks that purchasing the building will be the perfect answer to expanding their business. The building is on the market due the fact that Moe Davidson was murdered a month ago and neither his widow Emma or his children, Lorraine or Chuck wants to carry on his clown business. The police had arrested a homeless man, Royal Hollis, who confessed to murdering Moe and the prosecuting attorney and the sheriff feel they have an “open and shut” case. Joe ends up representing Hollis and feels that the case is full of holes.

Lee, along with the real estate agent, Tilda VanAust, are doing a walk through of the building and find Emma upstairs and near death. Lee finds an empty prescription vial near Emma's body. While Emma is in the hospital, Lee goes to visit and finds a man trying to suffocate her. Hospital security don't believe the story and Lee is escorted out. Soon Hollis' estranged daughter shows and Lee is finally able to convince her that they are looking for her dad's best interests.

Lee and Joe begin to look into events that led up to Moe's death and are able to come up with a more likely story of what happened and need to track down how the new information will lead them to the killer before any more lives are lost.

Interesting facts about the history of chocolate are also included with the book.

Will be looking forward to the next adventure in Warner Pier. ( )

Moe Davidson was the town clown. His store sold all types of items relating to clowns: costumes, equipment, figurines, posters, etc. He dressed as a clown and made both adults and children laugh. But, as a person, everyone hated him. When his body was found and very quickly Royal Hollis, a homeless man, confessed, the sheriff’s office said the case had been solved.
Lee Woodyard, part owner of TenHuis Chocolade next door to Moe’s shop, thought it would be a wonderful opportunity to buy his store so she could expand the chocolate shop. But complications arise when Lee’s husband, Joe, was asked to become the lawyer for Hollis who was in jail awaiting trial for the murder. A mysterious phone call casts suspicion on his actual guilt. Suddenly, it did not seem quite so cut and dried.
THE CHOCOLATE CLOWN CORPSE follows the family members of both the Hollis and Davidson families, especially as another person becomes the target for murder.
JoAnna Cadi points out the differences between the way people used to treat “tramps” a few generations ago–hiring them to do odd jobs in exchange for a meal–and people today treat the “homeless”–putting them in shelters or claiming they really aren’t “truly needy.” We avoid all personal contact with them.
The book offers some historical facts about chocolate, beginning with its early use in South America. “The scientific name for the cacao tree, Theobroma cacao, means “food of the gods.” Sounds reasonable to me!
The book rehashes the story at times. There are a few inconsistencies (e.g.., one character’s daughter claims she has never met him but then provides a lot of information about his life over the last few decades. Lee heard a knock at the door and said it wasn’t Joe because he had a key. A couple pages later, she unlocks the door in response to another knock and it is Joe.
The book is a quick-read and has a mainly logical story line. ( )

Yikes! The Chocoholic series have come a full circle for me. Maybe the very first modern cozy mysteries I've read, it has now become a one star book, at the tail-end of my readership of the genre, through no planning on my part. I remember the first book of the bunch I had read. It made a positive impression on me. At the time I thought that the genre was tailor made for me.

But the habit of writers to keep on prolonging the franchise became an irritation with me. Even the best authors cannot keep on churning out these books without some damage, erosion, dilution, some type of loss occurring. This fourteenth book was empty of any decent plot worth the name. There were some eccentric and inappropriate sentences in the book, which I attribute to the advancing age of the author.

Someone might have told JoAnna Carl not to kill off too many people in her stories. Killing off a whole community of them would not have saved this story if tension, conflict, suspense, and motives were absent from the book. Even at 240 pages, it was sometimes a chore to read through the book. You know, reading these types of books has one positive effect on me. They make me want to write something. Not because I think it's easy to write a novel, but because after giving a drab story one star, I need to prove that I was not gabbing for nothing, that I'm not asking for the impossible by demanding a good simple story to delight the senses and sharpen the mind. Anyway, I'm Luffy, former cozy mystery fan, signing off. ( )