Gray's Cozy Nook

Eclairs and Present Danger is the first book in a new series by Laura Bradford, she is also the author of An Amish Mystery Series and the Tobi Tobias Mystery Series. While I’m not familiar with her Tobi Tobias books, I am familiar with her work from the Amish Mystery ones. I’ve thoroughly her Amish mysteries and had held high expectations to this new series, as the synopsis was by far deliciously intriguing.

We follow Winnie, the main protagonist as she tries to make her new Emergency Dessert Squad a hit in the town after her bakery was forced to close down. In the first chapters we see the murder transpire, and you are led to believe that we will watch this MC start amateur sleuthing her way to solving the death of her beloved friend. Alas, this whodunit was not meant to be, as there happened to be no mystery whatsoever in the pages until the very end.

Instead, we have her and her best friend, Renee, fighting over men and objectifying them to a point of absurdity. We also lose the mystery and the point of even trying to solve the murder for a very long time because of said above statement. The whole novel is composed of Winnie’s lack of being a grown adult when faced against a sixteen-year-old with jealousy issues. What’s even more irritating is Winnie is in her thirties and allowed the teenager to scold her over something extremely stupid.

The story mostly focuses on Winnie’s love life turmoil and how she fails at being an adult until the last two or three chapters of the novel, where we finally start to solve the murder. Overall, this was a disappointing story, and should not be marked as a cozy mystery. Instead, it should have been marketed as a chick-lit book with mild mystery elements. Sadly, this book gets 1.5 stars, the 1.5 being for the cat, Lovey, because Lovey was the only sane and honest character out of the whole tale.