Normally I give a novel at least a few pages before deciding it’s not for me. Two of these I read about half but the other fell off my lap after about 20 pages. All three of these books had great reviews on Amazon and Barnes and Noble but they just did not work for me.
Pies and Prejudice (A Charmed Pie Shoppe Mystery) felt like a rerun. Heroine Ella Mae runs from her cheating husband back home to a small Georgia town and starts a pie shoppe. Of course her arch enemy from kindergarten on through high school shows up, her former crush shows up and she is suspected in a murder. With me so far?
Ella Mae makes pies to fit her mood and the person and bakes a bit of enchantment into each one. It’s a little like Garden Spells but without the charming eccentric characters and real-feeling fantasy element.
Despite Pies and Prejudice having 4 1/3 stars on Amazon I simply could not finish. Characters, setting, plot, dialogue were flat, uninteresting.
I got further with Mark of the Mage (The Scribes of Medeisia), over half way through. I was not particularly enjoying the story but it wasn’t so bad that it made me get up off the couch to read something else. At least not until my tea mug ran out and I needed a refill!
Mark of the Mage (The Scribes of Medeisia) isn’t a bad book, it just didn’t have enough oomph to keep me reading. This one also has 5 stars on Amazon so my blah feeling might have been me not the novel.
The second murder mystery, Leave No Stone Unturned (A Lexie Starr Mystery, Book 1), was the best of the lot, good enough that I could have finished had there not been something else to read. The story is a cute combination of suspense and romance, with late 40s widowed Lexie Starr concerned about her daughter’s new husband, Clay. Lexie doesn’t like the guy but is determined to put a happy face until she stumbles across a newspaper article that he is the prime suspect in his first wife’s murder. Lexie’s daughter doesn’t even know Clay had been married before.
Lexie makes up a story for her daughter about meeting up with a jeweler she met online and takes off for Schenectady to research the murder. This is where Leave No Stone Unturned lost me. Lexie tells the police detective she’s writing a novel about the case and that she could help. Really. No police detective who ever saw a single episode of Murder She Wrote or any of its imitators is going to be too excited about that and a clever woman like Lexie could surely come up with a better reason to talk to him.
The romance is sweet without being maudlin and is the best part of the story. It just was’t good enough to keep me reading the rest. Leave No Stone Unturned has 4 1/3 stars on Amazon too, so once again my opinion is the minority. I’d give it 3 stars.
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