Monday, August 8, 2022

Murder at the Blueberry Festival

Title: Murder at the Blueberry Festival
Author: Darci Hannah
Published: July 26th 2022, Kensington Books
Format: Kindle, 319 Pages
Genre: Amateur Sleuth
Source: My thanks to Netgalley and the Publisher for the opportunity to read an advanced copy of this book.
Series: Beacon Bakeshop #3

First Sentence: Having lived in an old, refurgished lighthouse in Michigan for over a year, I had come to realize a few things.

Blurb: After a career on Wall Street, Lindsey is making a different kind of dough in a pretty lakeside village, and the upcoming blueberry festival—including the pie-eating contest her bakery is hosting—is the highlight of the summer. But soon Beacon Harbor runs into a patch of trouble.

A local real estate agent gets pranked. A parade float gets pelted with water balloons. It’s all laughed off until the stunts start escalating—and looking more like sabotage. As the event turns into a debacle complete with rampaging goats, Lindsey’s sweetheart, a former SEAL, starts investigating. But the juicy mystery takes a bitter turn when a man—dressed up as a Viking—is found dead in a boat, and it’s no longer mischief but murder .

My Opinion: I was beginning to wonder if the murder mystery was going to appear. Thinking that the suspense was only going to involve tracking down a prankster, and decided that I would be ok with that if the pranks remained funny. Then the body appeared, leading to Darci Hannah becoming too obsessed with what sounded like a Dr. Seuss rhyme. After the verse ran its course, things settled a bit, but there were more questions to answer.

Unfortunately, the answers came after a drawn-out repetitive book which had the reader wondering if the author had a direction or resorted to throwing ideas out in the hope something would eventually stick.

I enjoyed the first two books in this series, but this one completely missed the mark.

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