lit_stacks's Reviews (579)

After the first third, this book was a boring conglomeration of food descriptions with two dimensional characters who don’t act in logical ways, I.e. Mallory’s literal “come-to-Jesus” moment was totally unbelievable. Even more unbelievable was Hasan’s forgiveness of her, given that he has no reason to do so. Then the book verges into the problematic when Mallory presents French cooking as superior to Indian cooking.

I listened to this book and it was suspenseful enough to keep me listening and not overly complex so as to be difficult to listen to. However, I had the twist worked out basically at the time the murderer was revealed in the early portion of the book. Flynn introduced one other murder group at the murder club convention, so it was a little obvious that she wanted us to have this group in the back of the reader’s mind.

I read Nick Offerman’s book a few years back, so a good portion of this book was redundant. There were definitely cute parts, but I didn’t need a whole book about them. They do puzzles, listen to audiobooks, and love their two dogs. That was about all I needed to know.

I came to this book because of the Ballad of Billy Balls (I listened to the audiobook because iO’s voice is so good), the podcast in which iO tries to find out more about his mother’s true love’s death. In this book, iO seems to attribute a lot of his mother’s troubles to Billy Balls’ murder. So I hope iO has a book/podcast deal so that he can explore what life is like now that Rhonna/Rebecca knows more about Billy’s murder.