Laura Levine

Joanne Fluke is one of my favorite cozy mystery writers for a reason and this hilarious tale of Hannah at Christmastime was a real treat that I thoroughly enjoyed. We start off with a hilarious scene of Hannah dressing up as Santa’s elf, which of course would come with a horrendous costume and Hannah despairing over her weight. Who can’t relate? Joanne Fluke just has such a knack for humor. As she flings candy canes to the crowd gathered at the Lake Eden Inn, all are merry, but soon, show more there’s a murder to solve… I really enjoyed this one!

Leslie Meier’s was a trip back in time to Lucy, Bill and Toby’s first days in Tinker’s Cover, when their farmhouse was falling apart and Bill wasn’t sure he was going to succeed as a carpenter. This was a fun one as Lucy Stone works to solve a mystery from decades ago, and we see how she originally met some of her longtime friends in her Maine small town. And I loved the candy cane connection in all three books!

Please excuse typos/name misspellings. Entered on screen reader. show less

A boring, lackluster mystery full of stupid characters, even dumber scenarios, and a lot of desperately unfunny attempts at humor.

Jaine Austen’s Christmas plans are turned upside down when her ‘best friend’ Lance announces he has accepted a job for the two of them to housesit a ritzy Bel Air mansion for two weeks over the upcoming holidays. When they arrive, they meet the weird next door neighbors—Missy and Scotty. Scotty is a loathsome former child star whose abrasive personality show more and niggardly ways have made an enemy of everyone in the neighborhood, including his own wives—both current and former. When Jaine discovers Scotty dead, clobbered over the head with a day-old Yule log, she becomes a prime suspect and clumsily sets out to clear her own name.

It is risible to even refer to Jaine Austen as an amateur sleuth because she is such a clueless moron. As Jaine bumbles through the sloppy plotline, she labels all of the characters as ‘the killer’ at some point or another; she is convinced that Every. Single. One. of them just has to be the murderer. Of course, it is the one and only character Jaine pays zero attention to who turns out to be the real culprit. Duh. It really comes as no surprise since everything Jaine does is so idiotic.

Even something as prosaic as Jaine’s eating habits unmask her as a colossal nitwit. The author wastes countless pages expounding on Jaine’s hatred of kale and tofu. (Jaine has an aversion to health food that borders on the psychotic.) At some point, she goes to a (gasp!) vegetarian restaurant (oh, the horror!) & orders an avocado & mozzarella sandwich, which Jaine proclaims is all right except for all of the godawful sprouts that got crammed into it. It never seems to occur to Jaine’s pea-sized brain to ask the restaurant to leave the sprouts off (restaurants will do little things like that, you know), or to even take them off herself after the fact; given Jaine’s limited capabilities, she probably would have needed a diagram and instruction book to accomplish even that minor feat. (I guess one can’t really expect too much from a person with such numskull parents they can’t even spell the name Jane properly.) Seriously, this woman needs to be in a home for incompetents.

Jaine’s inability to ever stand up for herself renders her even more pathetic and unlikeable. Whether it’s her endless (and I do mean ENDLESS) stream of hellish blind dates, or her constant inability to reclaim her own cat, or her refusal to tell Lance to go to hell every time he refers to how ugly she is, Jaine never has any brains, any backbone, or any semblance of self-worth. She is quite literally one of the most dimwitted and useless cozy mystery heroines I have ever encountered, and that is saying quite a lot.

The only character who is even more odious than Jaine is her gay, self-centered, verbally abusive, drama-queen best friend Lance. Lance’s two favorite words are fab & hon, and he uses them with stomach-churning frequency. Lance is a cruel, manipulative liar who is constantly putting Jaine down and reminding her how fat and unattractive she is while simultaneously forcing her into doing things she doesn’t want to do. Lance does things like accepting a Christmas job for Jaine without asking her first, and creating a horrific online dating profile for her behind her back. Isn’t he a peach? Lance is no one’s idea of a decent human being, yet Jaine puts up with all of his crap because he buys her expensive presents. (!?!?!?) And the author treats this behavior as comedic gold that will have readers rolling in the aisles with laughter. Offensively nauseating doesn’t even begin to describe it.

And amongst all of this horrifying drivel, we are subjected to thoroughly irrelevant emails from Jaine’s parents about the Caribbean cruise they are taking with their cult-like HOA. I have no clue what the point of that was, except to say that it was utterly pointless nonsense.

Run, don’t walk, away from this horrible series! show less

Things are looking up for Jaine Austen...sort of. She has been hired to do revisions on a really awful play, I Married A Zombie, based on an equally awful and thankfully quickly cancelled TV show by the same name (Jaine had solved the murder of the star of the show in a past book). As bad as the play is, the woman hired as lead actor somehow manages to make it worse. She has no discernible acting skills beyond the ability to twist the director/producer around her little finger and she uses show more this to make constant demands, one of which is that she is allowed time every rehearsal for her favourite smoothie. No surprise to anyone when she is murdered by said smoothie. The only problem is who dunnit and a whole cast of suspects who seem to have been more than willing to play the role of murderer.

Death by Smoothie is the nineteenth in A Jaine Austen Mystery series and it is a fast, fun, and, at times, laugh-out-loud funny cozy mystery and I'd like to thank Netgalley and Kensington Books for the opportunity to read it in exchange for an honest review. There's plenty of twists and turns and it kept me guessing. But I'll admit the best part of the novel for me were the antics of her cat Prozac and the emails of her parents. Loved it! show less

This book is a hoot. Mystery and humor vie for the front seat - both are equally entertaining. Jaine gets tapped to punch up a dismal script for a play based on a bad TV show. The producer/director/leading man won the lottery and now gets to live his dream. Unfortunately, one of the cast members doesn’t. Jaine sets out to find the killer, but there are so many suspects it’s hard to narrow down the playing field. The star of this cozy is Prozac the cat who steals every scene she is in. show more Well written with delightfully quirky characters, this mystery is fun from beginning to end. show less