Ann S. Marie

Dana Sweet is starting over in the small Canadian town where she lived when she was young. Grandma Rae, the woman who raised her after her parents death, has left Dana her bakery/cafe in her will. After renaming, re-envisioning the cafe and investing her savings to make it a success, Dana is looking forward to running it with her cousin Kathy.

Things get off to a rocky start when an infamous reporter with the local paper is found dead, poisoned with one the cafe’s famous cupcakes. Made show more worse by the fact that Dana was in his office when the body was found. She seems to be the prime suspect in the man’s death, even though he has run afoul of half the town with his alley cat ethics. If that weren’t enough, someone is trying to scare Dana off, leaving threatening notes and sneaking around her home. She needs to put the clues together before someone else gets hurt and cafe is lost forever.

This was nice start to what promises to be a decent series. The residents in Berry Cove are colorful and quirky. Dana is immediately likable and her eccentric family provides plenty of entertainment. We even have a watch cat, keeping tabs on his mistress and keeping her out of trouble. It does seem like every other Cozy has a cupcake theme, however this is a unique enough idea that it shows great potential.

This review is part of a book spot spotlight originally posted at https://ireadwhatyouwrite.wordpress.com/2016/04/02/a-month-of-cozy-strawberry-cr... show less

A downloaded freebie I thought might find me a new series and be a light, quick, frothy little cozy mystery. At time of writing this review, the kindle edition was still free.

Which it was. Very sweet. Yes, very, very, very sweet. Even when our sweet heroine thought she found the killer and confronted she would tell them how much she understood them yet was "disappointed" in them.

It was a decent read with enough to keep me turning the pages -- but overall I think too sweet for me. I'm not the show more biggest mystery fan so someone more into cozy mysteries might have a different opinion.

I also did not get a sense of the small town Canadian setting other than it said she moved from NYC to a small Canadian town (residents would say things like "honey child" where the town sounded more like deep south USA). show less

For a self-publish, it was OK. As someone who has a degree in editing, I do have some suggestions for the author:

1. Invest in a thesaurus and learn to use it -- heavily. The key adjective to describe the interior of a Victorian style house should not be "cool", unless you are speaking of temperature, which you weren't. And certainly you should not use it 3 times in the space of less than 2 pages. Goodness!

2. Take a college-level writing course that you attend in person, i.e. not online. One show more of the key advantages of these is others read your work and you get real feedback. Then join a writers group. Go to conferences for the type of writing you are doing -- conferences that have presentations on writing how to sessions. Listen and take notes. Brandon Sanderson said that is how he built skills for his fantasy writing.

3. Read your work out loud to yourself. Listen to the cadence, rhythm, and tempo. To catch spelling errors and verb tense errors, read your work backwards (not out loud). Seriously, it works.

4. Spell checkers are helpful but not infallible. Don't rely on them too much. For instance when someone mentally "checks out", the word is spelled "trance" not "trans".

5. Find a friend who reads more than you do who respects you enough to tell you when you are being a nim-norf.

6. Read authors such as Grafton, Evanovich and Eva Gates, not for pleasure, but to study methodology and technique. You rely far too heavily on questions to represent inner thought even when they read as statements and not questions. Note these authors do not employ that type of technique. Study how they do indicate the main character's thought process.

7. Respect your characters enough to give all of them last names unless there is a critical reason not to. Mike the mail guy should only have "the mail guy" stated once. Since there are no other Mikes in the book, why do you still use that halfway through the book? It comes across as silly. The same with Phil the pharmacist. Perhaps Phil Connors. Wait, that won't work, Phil Connors is a weatherman in Pennsylvania (Groundhog Day).

8. I loved Truffles the cat. She reminded me of The Cat Who books. (Another series for you to study).

Good luck. Oh, and before I was finished with this review, I edited it 7 times. A minimum for me. show less

I usually like culinary themed cozies, but when I started to read this one, I remembered that I'd read another in this series and had issues with the cat that points its owner in the right direction to investigate the murders.