Book Review: Hanging by a Thread by Dorothy Howell (Sewing Studio Mysteries #2)

Stars: 2 out of 5

Pros: Characters, all the baking

Cons: Plot needed serious work

The Bottom Line:

Rival baker dead

Plot that needed editing

Characters still good

Book Was Threadbare

When I read the first book in the Sewing Studio Mysteries, I liked the characters and the setting, but I found the plot a little lacking.  I had hoped it was because the first book was setting things up, and the second book would be better.  Sadly, Hanging by a Thread was worse.

The first book introduced us to Abbey Chandlier, who had moved to Hideaway Grove, California, where she spent summers with her aunt Sarah.  She wound up setting up a sewing studio in the storage room connected to her aunt’s bakery and getting involved in a charity project.  And she solved a murder.  This is a cozy mystery after all.

This book finds trouble in the form of a rival bakery opening soon.  Blaine Hutchinson isn’t popular in town, and the fact that she’s opening this bakery is making her even less so, especially to Sarah and Abbey.  Then, one night, Blaine is murdered in her bakery.  Who did it?

Meanwhile, Abbey has also been asked by the owner of the toy store in town to find out who is taking collectible dolls from her backroom.  She suspects her new employee – who happens to be the sheriff’s niece.

Both of these plots are set up in the first chapter, and the murder happens by the end of chapter two.  In my mind, that’s usually a good sign that the book is going to be a great read.  That wasn’t the case here.  The main mystery would have worked well as a novella.  Instead, it is a novel, so we get lots of passages with Abbey going over the few clues she has and worrying that nothing seems to be happening.  With the stolen dolls, Abbey does a little investigating and feels guilty that she isn’t doing more.  The solution to both of these storylines works, although one is pretty rushed.  They just weren’t strong enough to really carry the book.

To help fill in the page count, we get some repetition, but we also get lots of other things that Abbey has taken on.  I actually wanted to tell her to slow down and not take on anything else.  Plus there were some other complications that seemed to come out of nowhere.  I can see how they were playing into other aspects of the book, but they felt forced more than an organic story point.  There was little follow up on several things until late in the book.  A couple of the sub-plots just get dropped.  I expect they will come up in the next book, but I still feel like there was really no resolution to them here.

I did still like the characters overall.  Abbey is a sympathetic lead character.  There are a lot of supporting players, and they can get a bit lost in group scenes, but I did like the sense of community.

Having said that, there is an early sub-plot with the love interest that bugged me.  I fully support what Abbey was going for, but the way she handled it wasn’t the best.  It was played for laughs, but I didn’t see the humor in it.

Since the sewing studio is attached to Sarah’s bakery, we get lots of mouthwatering dessert descriptions.  No, there are no extras at the end of the book, but it makes me wish we got some of these recipes.

What we got here was a decent first draft, but it needed some more work before it was ready to be published.  I think Hanging by a Thread will be the last in the series I read.

NOTE: I received an ARC of this book.