Lil Pingwing’s Cozy Corner: Another One Bites the Crust

Cover image and synopsis from Goodreads:

Torte―the beloved small-town bakeshop run by Jules Capshaw―is set to hit the stage. But who would have guessed that murder would makes a surprise appearance?

It’s the role of a lifetime for Jules. The Shakespeare Festival has returned to Ashland, Oregon, for the season and Torte has been cast as the supplier of Elizabethan-era treats for the main event. But on the eve of opening night, a brawl between Jules’s friend Lance, the artistic director, and a strapping young thespian named Anthony almost brings down the house. . .and the next morning, Anthony is dead. Jules knows that Lance loves his drama―and his just desserts―but she also knows that murder is way off-script for him. Now it’s up to Jules to cut through a bevy of backstage betrayals and catty co-stars who all have their own secrets―before the curtain drops on someone else. . .

This is another book in the Bakeshop Mystery series, and I was excited to return again to Ashland.

I liked that this book really focused on Lance, the artistic director of the Shakespeare Festival. He’s been a fun secondary character throughout the series, and having him as a murder suspect was pretty fun. I also liked how the small-town police station struggled to keep Lance in custody, as they don’t have a jail. Being locked in a storage room seemed almost worse.

I have to say that I struggled with this book quite a bit. It was just as enjoyable as the others, and was still well-written and took place in the same great setting, but I just had a hard time getting really engrossed in the book. It may have been that this was a bad week for sleep for my baby (and therefore for me) so I didn’t really have much time or energy for reading, but I just wasn’t grabbed by the book and had a hard time following some parts of the murder mystery.

I will revisit this book later, once I have had more sleep. Perhaps it will give me a different result. It did still make me hungry though.