Start Over with the Christmas Cupcake Murder

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme. Read the rules and more teasers at The Purple Booker. Anyone can play along.

Start over? Yes, I am currently reading Joanna Fluke’s Christmas Cupcake Murder, and while it is book 26 in her Hannah Swensen series, it is actually set before the rest of the series in the timeline. Sort of the origin story for Hannah and the Lake Eden community.

As always with this culinary cozy mystery series, it is chock full of new treats to try out, with a recipe at the end of each chapter. Listening to it on audio, it is a little tedious to get through all of the recipes. I can’t just flip the page and start on the next chapter. (Well, I suppose I could fast forward to the beginning of the next chapter, but then I have to stop whatever I am doing, and hopefully the chapters are all marked and indexed properly.) With the audio version, it would have been nice if the recipes had all been moved to the end. Several of the characters sound a little breathy and naive to me. I don’t know if they are supposed to or not.

But as for the story itself, I am interested in how, in between all of their Christmas celebrations, Hannah and her cohorts will find out the identity of the homeless man with amnesia, and what his story might be.

…he smiled even wider as she delivered the cupcake and he saw that it was chocolate. “I love chocolate. My mother used to say that it was God’s gift to mankind.”

Joanne Fluke, Christmas…