Sometimes the only reason to keep reading a book is because it is short. This was the case here, and I am sad to say the book was not mercifully short. It was a hard task to struggle through it.

Kalina owns a store for comics and games and takes some of her merchandise to the town's annual Solstice fair. At the fair one of the blue ribbon winners of the bake off dies after drinking some tea and Kalina decides to investigate. Why? I don't know. Perhaps because everyone immediately started telling her not to get involved. I mean, that can be annoying: if everyone assumes the worst from you when you haven't set a foot wrong.

So Kalina gets involved and bulldozers in on the investigation.

She conveniently finds herself across the street when the police search the house of the murder victim, from where she can read a note the police carry out in an evidence bag. And when she takes her nephew to the police station, the detective conveniently leaves a case file on his desk - in her presence - while he goes to fetch himself some coffee.

The plot is pretty straight forward: Kalina finds a clue, that leads here to investigate something new, where she finds another clue, and so on until she figures out who did the dirty deeds. When she has her suspect, the story slows down, which makes the book feel very unbalanced.

I kept hoping this was because there would be a twist at the end where it turned out the fiancée did it. After all, why did the murderer wait all these years to kill the victims in short succession? He should have done it at a leisurely pace.

It felt though there was a better book hidden in this story. Perhaps if the author had sat on the story for a few more years, written a few more after and then had gone back to this one, she could have delivered a much better mystery.