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COOKING UP MURDER
by Miranda Bliss
Berkley, November 2006
256 pages
$6.99
ISBN: 0425212912


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Annie Capshaw and Eve DeCateur are as different as two women can be. Eve is a tall, beautiful blonde who has an innate grace and sense of self that gets her through most things with ease. Annie is short, dark-haired and called cute by all. She can and has burned the pot when trying to boil water and she can fall over her own feet easily. But the two have been best friends since forever and have stayed friends through many men and Annie's bad marriage that just ended.

Trying to get Annie through her blues, Eve signs them both up for ten days of cooking classes at the fancy shop Tres Bonne Cuisine. Annie isn't too thrilled with the idea of a cooking class but when she sees the teacher, a hunky Scotsman with a wonderful way of rolling his rrrs, she begins to come around. But no matter how much she tries, her dishes are still bad news, while Eve manages to create masterpieces with little effort.

When they need to go back to the class after hours to fetch a watch that Eve left behind, they come across a man lying in the alley. They had seen the same man fighting with a Romanian woman, Beyla, from their cooking class earlier that day. Eve goes to call for help and Annie hears the man say a few words with a deep foreign accent as he hands her a receipt from a restaurant. He then dies.

Unfortunately the cops that are put in charge of the case happen to be Eve's ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend, who are insulting and won't listen to anything Eve and Annie say. That makes them angry enough to decide to investigate the crime themselves and to find the murderer to show that they are smarter than the cops. The thing is that both women have absolutely no background in solving crimes and aren't sure how to go about it.

They proceed to investigate by suspecting almost everyone in the class - especially Beyla and the owner of the restaurant. Earlier that day the girls had seen the secretive owner fighting with the now dead man. The friends don't know who to trust and who to watch out for. Before long they are completely over their heads as they stumble into dangerous situations and find even more danger and death.

This new series does its best to give the readers reasons to like it. The friends are likeable and they definitely care a great deal about each other. Unfortunately I found the two to be a bit too cartoonish. Annie is constantly falling over herself and making a mess where Eve seems to be total perfection no matter how little she tries. Because both seemed so over the top I couldn't feel a connection to either one and so couldn't really care about them.

Also, the class meets each night, skipping Sunday, and even though terrible things are happening and the threat of death seems to surround the class, everyone shows up to cook each night as if there's nothing wrong going on. If the people in the book don't feel that there is any danger, how are the readers supposed to feel any tension at all?

Many an amateur sleuthing partnership is made up of people with little background in investigation, but this couple not only don't have any background but also have no aptitude for getting to the truth of things either. Most of their work consists of asking everyone in sight questions, but since they both have no head for investigating and no talent for deduction, they wander around confused until, at the end, the guilty party actually has to confess in front of them.

A little light on the murder mystery portion of the story and a bit too cartoonish in the make-up of the friends, COOKING UP MURDER is a pleasant but not very satisfying book. I'm not so certain that I will have an urge to read any new installment in the series that might come along.

Reviewed by A. L. Katz, April 2007

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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