Warning: stay away from this book!
It's is not often that I completely pan a book, but this mystery was absolutely dreadful.
I tried, I really did. I gave it 6 chapters and the first murder. But the dialogue, the reactions of our amateur detective and her aunt to finding a dead body literally on the door step of her business, the repetitious conversation of Marci's aunt--all annoyed the heck out of me.
Aunt Barb is like a 12-year-old girl whose best friend has a boy that Barb thinks has a crush on her friend and that's the only thing she can talk about. Aunt Barb, upon learning that a woman who was in the bakery the day before has been murdered outside their door, doesn't gasp with horror, doesn't say "Oh no, poor thing!," doesn't say "Marci, are you OK? You just found someone dead; here, sit down, let me get you some tea or a shot of whisky." No, Aunt Barb say "you should ask the detective out. You have the hots for him, admit it. He has the hots for you. You should ask him out." And she repeats this conversation about 7 times in the pages following the arrival of the police. We haven't even had the body removed from in front of the shop yet, so it's been what, an hour or two in fictional time?
Marci, bakery shop owner and pastry chef whose baked goods are said by everyone in Paris, KY, to have magic in them (the first customer we meet wants to buy something because she's heard as soon as someone buys one of Marci's pastries, they find their true love. Insert eye roll here.) gets caught by the detective (you know, the one that has the hots for her) with evidence that she removed from the crime scene and Marci asks herself if she should lie and not tell him. Because--why? Presumably because he is the boss of the Frenchman who was the murder victim's ex-boyfriend and Marci muses to herself that she should call the boss and ask him about the murder, because--why? Because that's definitely the way to impress someone you have the hots for, by lying to them?
Why does Marci think she might be a suspect? She met the victim once for 5 seconds in her bakery. Surely the 'lovesick' detective wouldn't find that a convincing reason to suspect her. Why does Marcy vacillate between swooning over the detective's dreamy brown eyes and the Frenchman's attractive accent within the same paragraph? Why does she fall head over heels for the Frenchman at first sight? I'm not adverse to love at first sight, but there was no description of a sudden onslaught of tingly feelings down to her toes, no feeling that all the breath had left her lungs, no sentence that time stopped when Antoine smiled at her, none of the tropes bad romances or even good ones use to describe the instant attraction one might feel to a stranger. Nope, just the writing style of a 13-year-old girl writing in her diary about two boys she has crushes on and the vapid discussion about them in the locker room with her best friend, and oh yea, someone was murdered in front of my door, but let's ignore that because he's dreamy...
Do not read Macarons Can Be Murder by Rose Betancourt. Do not waste your time or your money. The author lists 15 or so series in the front matter that are written under various pseudonyms, and clearly that shows. Dreadful. Avoid at all costs.
