Book Review: A Spoonful of Murder by Connie Archer (Soup Lover's Mystery #1)

Stars: 2 out of 5

Pros: Most of the characters

Cons: Very slow story

The Bottom Line:

Very slow story

Does not serve characters well

A cozy to skip

Half Warmed Soup

I seem to be in a new series frenzy right now, with multiple new series on my plate to try as soon as possible.  One of those was A Spoonful of Murder, the first in a cozy series that centers around a soup and sandwich restaurant.  If only it were as good as it sounded.

Lucky Jamieson has returned to her childhood home of Snowflake, Vermont to run By the Spoonful Soup Shop, the restaurant her parents spent their entire life operating.  Honestly, now that she has inherited it, she can’t quite decide if she wants to leave it open or not.  But until she does, business seems brisk.

All that changes when a dead body is found behind the restaurant after a bad snow storm.  When the police arrest Sage, the restaurant’s chef, the crowds completely disappear.  Lucky knows that Sage couldn’t have done it, but no one really knows anything about the woman murdered.  With the police done investigating, can Lucky poke around and find the real killer?

I did like the characters, especially Sage and his younger brother Remy.  In fact, I would have liked them to have more of a presence in the book.  The other supporting characters were enjoyable as well.  Lucky would be a bit inconsiderate and grating at times, but I always bought her motives for trying to uncover the truth.

That is when the story was moving forward.  The book started slowly, and I was wondering if I had stumbled into a chick lit book instead, one about a woman trying to piece her life back together after her parents died.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it wasn’t what I was planning to read.

There were a few odd things that happened before the body dropped, but once it did I thought the book would pick up.  Sadly, it really didn’t.  Lucky does begin investigating, but the plot moves forward very slowly.  It just felt like the plot was stretching to fill a word count with several recaps and rehashes between new clues and red herrings.  The book really needed to be tightened up.

There are three delicious sounding soup recipes and two sandwich recipes at the back of the book.  This is a culinary cozy, after all.

In the end, I was glad to finish A Spoonful of Murder, and I won’t be back for the sequel.