First in the series for me. I’m not hooked.

Violet is preparing for her wedding to Chief David Rainwater a week before Christmas. Well, her grandmother and her best friend are taking care of most of the preparations. Which is a good thing because Christmas is the busiest time of the year for a bookshop owner.

This thought kept distracting me throughout the story: if Christmas shoppers are such a big deal (half her annual revenue Violet musses at some point), then why set your wedding date and honeymoon in the week before Christmas?

The honeymoon is postponed as after the ceremony Chief Rainwater picks a dead body out of the river and Violet recognizes the woman is someone that came into the shop a few days before to sell a first print copy of Walden. A book that is now missing. The death is quickly ruled an accident, but Chief and Violet agree that she will look for the book for three days, before they go on their honeymoon.

And this is what irked me: Violet seems to be a responsible and organized person, yet she had not arranged for anyone to take care of her shop while she was away for the week. When she wants to go snooping, she has to make an impromptu call to a friend to watch the shop for her for a few hours. How is that responsible? Or planning ahead?

Violet talks about the essence of the shop a lot, about watering the birch tree with water from the spring and that she goes to fetch the water after dark because she doesn’t want to answer awkward questions. (What’s wrong with the answer ‘the birch tree seems to thrive best on it’ and just leave it at that?) I’m actually more worried that she’s bossed around by her pets. I guess you’d have to be a pet owner to understand that.

I read an ARC through NetGalley.

It’s fluff. A quick read, but not much substance.

New B&B owner and former LAPD cop, Mel O’Rourke gets quite a shock when she finds one of her guests dead in front of the fireplace. It could be a heart-attack, but her cop training tells her not to rule anything out. She calls local police, and is told to store the body some place cold, because the police won’t be able to make it up the hill for another day or two because of the snow.

I wonder why not start with calling a physician? Granted, the man is dead, so a physician can’t do much, other than establish cause of death. But if it’s naturel causes, the police are pretty useless too.

It’s at one third of the story that Mel suggests to call a physician. By that time a police officer has arrived and he nixes the suggestion. He’s sure it was a heart-attack. And apparently, he can sign death-certificates.

Then another of Mel’s guests is found dead and Mel starts to really worry what this will do to her business. Headlines about two dead guests are surely going to scare off the typical B&B clientele. Mel decides she must dig into this investigation and soon she finds a connection between the two dead guests, and one of the town’s people. But he’s too cute to be a killer, right?

I read an ARC through NetGalley.

Some of the desciptions of the romanc sub-genres made me laugh. Did not really address the how to part of how to write an awful romance.

At the wedding of her last friend to get married, Poppy finds out that her friends have all turned into halves of a smug married couple. And their are doing couples’ things together, to which she is not invited, because she is single.

Or so she thought. A few days later her dad calls her. It appears her mother has never properly filed Poppy’s divorce papers, so she is still married. And her not so ex is about to get married again.

To prevent that Zac, who once was the love of her life, becomes an unwitting bigamist, Poppy and new-found friend Kat jump in a car and head over to Scotland, where the wedding party has rented an entire island. How they get onto the island to get Zac to sign the divorce papers is something they’ll figure out once they get there.

Loved this story. Loved Poppy. I was rooting for her all the way to the end.

I read an ARC through NetGalley.

Aan de hand van het acroniem SPANNING laat Boersma zien hoe je een spanningsboog creëert voor je thriller. Goede vondst.

Not my cup of tea, as they say.

A lot of tea was drank in this story. Pretty much every time two (or more) people sat down to talk there was tea. Though on a few occassions there were G&Ts.

The choice of drinks or their quantity of intake wasn't my issue. The way all the information in this book was repeated over and over again, was. There are whole conversations that are a repeat of a previous conversation. Just because there's a new person in the conversation doesn't mean everything that was said needs to be in the scene. At these times tell, don't show is a much better rule of writing. It would have made this book about 40% short, I am sure.

Bookshop owner Nancy has invited a famous author to do a talk at the Summer Fete in her village. And he's agreed to come! Someone's not happy about that Nancy realizes as she finds a defaced poster announcing the event. She manages the track down the person and warns the author. The author isn't worried. He's coming anyway and he's bringing a bodyguard.

Alas, the threats were not empty. There is a murder at the Summer Fete. The scene looks exactly like the murder scene in the author's latest book. It even seems the murderer has made the exact same mistake as the murderer in the book.

This leads to a quick case closed by the police. But something is bugging Nancy. No surprise, she was named after a famous fictional detective (this is mentioned twice). At this point something else was bugging me: what car was Thomas driving after Nathan took off with his car? Does Dedley End have a rental service? A used car lot? Did he buy it on eBay?

I admit, I read on to find out out about the car. And to find out if I had picked the motive of the murderer correctly. At this point in the story I was no longer all that interested in it. This became worse when Nancy and her friends make an important discovery through a clue left to them by the victim. That's not sleuthing! I read cozy mysteries for the sleuthing, and this story hardly had any sleuthing in it. Nancy tracked down the man who defaced her poster and later gains illegal access to his house, but that was it. That was all the sleuthing there was in this story.

For that reason (and because most people in this story get way to hung up about the value of a story idea) this was not my cup of tea.

Also, the car is not mentioned again.

I read an ARC through NetGalley.

Holly is a fast talking narrator and particularly in the beginning of the story I often lost track of what was going on or why I was being introduced to three new people. What isn’t helping is that often not much time is taken to set a scene.

So, by chapter ten, I did not have much of a clue of what’s going on, except that a lot of people have reason to hate Bunny Franks. Or start legal proceedings against her because not only does she take bribes (or rather engages in extortion), it seems she is not above forging contracts.

Anyway, Bunny gets killed and soon the police zone in on one of Holly’s friends as the one most likely to be the murderer. Deciding the police will only look at the easiest way out of a murder investigation rather than explore all avenues, Holly sets it upon herself to investigate.

And uncovers people had even more reason to hate Bunny than Holly already thought.

Plot’s alright, but the story needs some in the execution. A little more scene setting. And I found most of Holly’s running commentary unnecessary.

I read an ARC through NetGalley.