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Joanne Fluke's Cookie Jar Mysteries are a favourite culinary cozy series, set in fictional Lake Eden, Minnesota. SUGAR COOKIE MURDER is a rather different format from its predecessors, though, and is billed as the first of the Hannah Swensen Holiday Mysteries. Readers familiar with the main series will be used to getting a handful of cookie recipes, but this time they get half a book of assorted winter recipes for everything from Appetizers to Eggnog -- it's the Lake Eden Potluck Cook Book and the mystery uses it as a backdrop. Hannah is acting as the editor of a book of recipes donated by the residents of Lake Eden, and has arranged for all the recipes to be swapped around and baked by other residents so they can be properly tested. It's approaching Christmas time in Lake Eden and the Community Centre is hosting the tasting party where the food can be photographed for the book, tried out, and everyone can have a get-together and dance to a jazz band. It's not surprising then that most of the characters from the series put on their best shoes and come out to play. Everything is going pretty well until almost simultaneously Hannah finds a body in the parking lot and a blizzard sweeps into town stranding everyone, including the killer, in the centre. Whilst Hannah's friend, Detective Mike Kingston, takes care of the paramedics and other formalities without letting everyone know what has happened, she sets out with her sisters to interview the partygoers and find out who might have had the opportunity and the motive to kill. As you might expect, with so much of the book given over to recipes, the mystery itself is a much shorter tale than usual, coming in at around 170 pages. It's fun to catch up with the usual characters again, and SUGAR COOKIE MURDER is a nice quick little tale to refresh the palate between more demanding reads. The plot is not up to the normal standards, though, and the writing feels rather rushed. In places the text is rather clunky with whole paragraphs given over to listing recipes to be found in the cookbook, and with a fair smattering of over-obvious facts. Do we really need to be told it is not a good idea to move a body? Or (twice) that platinum is expensive? So this is not the best book in the Hannah Swensen canon by a long way, and definitely not the place to start --try CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE MURDER, the first in the series, instead. But if you already like the Cookie Jar Mysteries you'll undoubtedly enjoy catching up with the folks again and finding out what's going on in their lives. It's certainly a bit of festive fun.
Reviewed by Bridget Bolton, September 2004
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