Cooking Competitions are Killer
Being the TV fan I am, I was immediately interested when I heard about Rose Kerr’s Death on the Set. A murder mystery set around a reality cooking competition? Sounded like something I would really enjoy.
After her husband of a few years dies and she loses her job, Brenna Flynn returns to Bayview City and takes on any job she can find. Fortunately, she has a friend who runs a temp agency, so when a job as a production assistant at Bayview Cooks! comes up, Brenna finds herself with a few weeks of steady income.
Her new job comes with early hours, so she is the first one on set her first full day on the job. And that’s a problem when she finds the dead body of Chef Mike, one of three local restaurant owners competing on the show. With the police looking at her as a suspect, Brenna begins trying to figure out what is really happening at her new job. Can she find the killer?
Brenna’s backstory is a bit more complicated than I’ve made it out to be here, but I really appreciated how quickly the authors gave us what we really needed to know and moved into the main mystery. Yes, we get more details as the books goes along, but they never felt like a data dump.
I do wish I could say the pacing was always that swift. I feel like the book got bogged down in the details of Brenna’s job at times. Yes, we would get some clues or red herrings, but I didn’t always feel like the info we got balanced out the details.
However, as the book neared the climax, we started to focus a bit more on the mystery. We did have some good twists that would keep me engaged. I also appreciated how Brenna pieced things together at the end and how the climax played out.
The book also needed a continuity edit, at least near the beginning. There were a couple of things that were brought up and then dropped. They ultimately had no bearing on the mystery so that’s not an issue, but it was annoying to me. Fortunately, once the book really got going, these issues disappeared.
I really did like the characters. Brenna is a strong protagonist who is working hard on rebuilding her life. She is surrounded by some fun family and friends. They feel like real characters already, and I can see how they have plenty of room to grow as the series progresses.
Another thing I really did like was that Brenna did a good job of sharing what she learned with the police. No, she wasn’t perfect, but she does a better job than many cozy sleuths do.
The hook of this series is going to be Brenna working a variety of temp jobs and finding murder and mayhem wherever she goes. While this book was a culinary cooking show setting, this isn’t necessarily a culinary cozy series.
There is definitely promise in Death on the Set. If you are looking for a new series, consider getting this one today.
I love the idea of a cozy mystery on a cooking show!
ReplyDeleteThe continuity issues would annoy me too but I love the idea of the premise!
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