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FITNESS KILLS
by Helen Barer
Five Star, July 2007
207 pages
$25.95
ISBN: 1594145857


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Nora Franke is a New York City food critic who is now on assignment at a fitness spa, Rancho de las Flores, in Baja, California. Professionally she's there to revamp the spa's menu and preparing to publish its recipe book, but on a personal note she's in Baja to try to restart her life.

She's just ended a long relationship and she's been miserable and has gained 30 pounds. She wants to try to rethink her life now, and lose some of the weight by taking all the classes she can at the spa and making herself into a calm and svelte woman.

She's been there two weeks and has lost some weight and has spent time alone reworking her inner self while trying to get the spa's chef to consider some of her suggestions. Now a new group of people who travel from spa to spa together have shown up and Nora is making friends with some of them. Alison Evans and Cece Clayton are two successful women who share Nora's sense of humor and they get on well. Cece and Nora even go on the liquid diet together.

Right away something is wrong as one of the regulars in that group, a man named Alan, goes missing. Then they find Alan's lifeless body off one of the paths on a nearby hill, and everyone is feeling terrible, not sure if it was an accident or if he was murdered. Then, as she swallows her liquid diet meal, Cece dies right in front of Nora, a victim of poisoning.

This murder spurs Nora to have her agent get her a journalist gig to write the story about the deaths. That way Nora has a professional reason to get to the bottom of the crimes to find out what's really going on. But almost right away Nora discovers that there is more than just a health spa taking place in Baja. The owners of the spa secretly have their hands in illegal substances and Nora discovers that some of the spa clients have rather shady ways of making their money.

Even when Nora's life is endangered and she's lucky to escape alive, she won't give up on this most important story until she finds out the truth!

FITNESS KILLS is a calm cozy that, although two people are killed and Nora is targeted, there isn't much tension that anything really bad will happen to her. No matter what takes place, Nora simply keeps doing her job at the spa by lecturing about food and giving classes on how people should deal with dieting and their health.

There are plenty of suspects at the spa with a few surprising twists at the end that will keep the readers occupied. I only wish that the writer, Helen Barer, had included some recipes that would help people learn more about the new rules for healthy eating.

FITNESS KILLS is the first of a new series and though it is rather too low-key, it still made for a good afternoon's light reading.

Reviewed by A. L. Katz, September 2007

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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