After a wild night out and finding out her husband cheated on her, Emory becomes a murder suspect. Not really surprising, she seems a bit dense. Somewhere around the time she found a hickey on her neck after a night out with her best friend Tori, I started to suspect her friend was setting her up. Not Emory. After finding Tori in an intimate pose with her husband, rolling on the lawn with her fighting and make reciprocal threats, she still seems to think her friend will help her out when she can’t log in to Facebook.

So she goes over to Tori’s apartment to get the Facebook problem sorted. Even if this wasn’t the afternoon after the morning before, it would have been quicker to just click “forgot password”. And if that didn’t work, to contact Facebook about her account being hacked. (I’m sure it happens; likely they have a policy.) Tori doesn’t answer the door and Emory lets herself in with a key Tori gave her. That’s when she finds the body of Tori.

From what we learn later about Tori, it seems odd that she would have given a house key to Emory. Or perhaps she thought Emory as clueless as her upstairs neighbours do and saw no harm in giving her a key.

Emory calls emergency and from that moment on starts asserting to anyone that might hear that she didn’t do it. That’s before anyone has accused her of anything. That seems a strange reaction, but it becomes clear once her mother and sister enter the story. Both these women have a habit of immediately assuming Emory is at fault when something bad happens. That sort of loved ones have got to be bad for a person’s self-esteem.

Emory decides she must prove she is innocent, because she is sure she’s a convenient suspect to pin the murder on. While she rushes around she picks up a useful clue here and there, plus a diverse list of crimes Tori might have been involved in. But rather than think that Tori’s criminal affairs caught up with her, Emory suspects one of her husband’s other lovers has killed Tori. And I’m left thinking what is so attractive about the husband that multiple single, independent women fall for this married guy. His attraction doesn’t come off the pages.

I didn’t like this book much. There is some merit to the plot, but it lacked focus. I found most of the characters to be either unrealistic or unpleasant, except for the older police chief that first arrested Emory and Tilly. The introduction of Tilly completely took the speed out of this book, but I guess it was a nice set up to have a sidekick for Emory in the next Cupcake Catering Mystery.

I read an ARC through NetGalley.