Death by Chocolate Finished 6-27-12, rating 2.5/5, 289 pages, pub. 2012
I briefly met Julie at the Ohioana Book Festival and picked up her book by the title alone. This is her first book, but she already has plans to publish books 2 and 3 in the series. I love her blog Musings from the Slush Pile. This is my fifth stop on my Ohio author tour.
Ruby Russell has just found out her husband has been cheating on her with a much younger woman. Instead of confronting the jerk she mixes his Viagra with some chocolate mousse and leaves it as a treat when he arrives home. The next morning Ruby wakes up to a dead husband and some very incompetent detectives. Ruby goes on to use her deadly culinary skills to deliver justice to her town and her best friend Charlotte is along for the ride. When Ruby’s son comes home with a bride-to-be the crazy reaches a fever pitch.
This book is completely over the top. Ruby, who you realize is stark raving mad about 50 pages in, goes on to kill many more people before, well, I can’t tell you that. I had a major problem with Ruby. I did not like her at all and I didn’t find her craziness funny. I couldn’t relate to anything that was going on in the book which made the book drag on for me. I wanted to like it and maybe it’s just because there’s a lot going on around here right now and I’m in no mood to suffer fools.
When I looked around it seemed that the other bloggers who have read it liked it, so what do I know? The storytelling was okay and all of the characters were full of interesting foibles. If you like high body counts in your mystery with a dash of nuttiness them maybe this would work for you.