Review - An Eggnog to Die For

I'm just now getting into some holiday themed mysteries that I had planned on reviewing a few weeks ago.  I am just going to roll with it, which means even after the 25th I will probably still be reviewing some to stretch out the holiday season!  First up is a foodie themed holiday cozy mystery, check this out.

Author: Amy Pershing

Copyright: November 2021 (Berkley) 320 pgs

Series: 2nd in Cape Cod Foodie mystery series

Sensuality: mild, kissing

Mystery Sub-genre: Cozy mystery, Amateur sleuth

Main Characters: Samantha Barnes, chef turned restaurant critic for Cape Cod Clarion

Setting: Contemporary, Cape Cod, Massachusetts

Obtained Through: Netgalley for honest review

Book Blurb: "Professional foodie Samantha Barnes has a simple Christmas list: a quiet holiday at home with her dog and a certain handsome harbor master; no embarrassing viral videos; and no finding dead bodies. Unfortunately she’s got family visiting, she’s spending a lot of time in front of the camera, and she’s just stumbled over the lifeless body of the town’s Santa Claus.

 

Plus, Sam’s plans for Christmas Eve are getting complicated.  There’s the great eggnog debate among her very opinionated guests.  There’s the “all edible” Christmas tree to decorate.  And there’s her Feast of the Five Fishes prepare. Nonetheless, Sam finds herself once again in the role of sleuth. She needs to find out who slayed this Santa—but can she pull off a perfect feast and nab a killer?"

Samantha is 6-foot tall, extroverted, clever, sarcastic, and easily relatable with a relentless curiosity-but she does some risky things.  She has an overly large dog name Diogi, always a hit.  Friends include Helene Greenberg, her nextdoor neighbor and the town librarian, Jenny Snow Singleton is a friend since childhood,  Miles Tanner is an old high school friend and local organic farmer, and Krista Baker is the publisher of the Clarion and old friend.  Her parents, Robert and Veronica Barnes, were the prior Clarion editor in chief and senior journalist, burst into town for the holidays.  Dad is secretive about something he spends time on and Mom is asked to do an article on the murder who thinks there is promise in a mob angle--further complicating Sam's holiday.  Introverted Jason Captiva is her old and new boyfriend who is the town harbormaster.  Sam's extroverted ways are struggling with Jason's introverted tendencies.

The main plot is finding the killer who killed Santa.  There are several subplots including keeping her mother out of trouble as she writes an article on the murder for the local paper, hosting and cooking a multiple-course Christmas Eve dinner, and navigating her confusing relationship with Jason.  Bad Santa knew a lot of people's secrets and had plenty of victims lined up to stop with his sanctimonious "doing the right thing" ways.  So there were plenty of red herrings.  Sam takes risks with her suspected killer suspects, which is out of character for an otherwise smart woman.  She goes through a few people she is convinced is the killer before she hits on the real killer. 

 

The killer confrontation is an example of best laid plans going awry (Sam was going to confront the killer safely). This provided a few tense moments that I enjoyed.  The wrap up finished up with family and friends.  It left me feeling a bit empty without all the characters that filled the book

My thoughts: If you enjoy cozies with lots going on outside of the sleuthing, then this will be a good book for you.  There is the still developing relationship with the harbormaster and her visiting parents to juggle, holiday errands, baking cookies and decorating them for the tree with her friend and three boys.  Additionally, her working for the paper and trying to keep her mother from investigating the mob angle while planning the details for a big holiday feast with friends invited keeps her busy.  Then her parents are going through her house and attic cleaning and rearranging etc.  Foodie talk with cooking tips/hacks are interspersed throughout the book, which I suspect most readers will enjoy.  

The characters are well drawn and portrayed with a mystery that keeps you guessing who did it.  The only downsides are how I found I didn't like that Sam refers to her parents as her ‘rents which is very annoying to me.  Am I the only one who doesn't like "sich/sitch" short for situation and 'rents short for parents etc?  Sam does do some risky things with who she suspects as the killer, but I still enjoyed her character.  Overall, I am glad to have discovered this new series and I'm looking forward to the next installment.  

Rating:  Excellent - Fun and entertaining holiday mystery, give it a try.

Author Guest Post - Amy Pershing

Please welcome Amy Pershing to M&MM blog.  She is a new author with the equally new Cape Cod Foodie cozy mystery series.  My review will be coming shortly.

The Eternal Mystery of Weird Holiday Food by Amy Pershing

Holiday food traditions – we all have them. Whether we like them or not. You mess with your mother’s Christmas cookie recipes at your peril. You serve Uncle Harry’s oyster stew, even though it makes your kids gag, because you love Uncle Harry. You stuff dates with chunky peanut butter as an appetizer (really?), because your husband (whom you also love, even though during the holidays that’s sometimes hard to remember) made them with his mother on Christmas day “to help out.”

In my latest Cape Cod Foodie mystery, An Eggnog to Die For, my heroine, Samantha Barnes, wants to honor her Italian grandmother on Christmas Eve with the traditional Feast of the Seven Fishes. Except Sam wants to make it a Feast of the Five Fishes. As she puts it, “Okay, so traditionally it’s seven fishes or even twelve. But times have changed. The holidays are stressful enough. Christmas Eve should be fun.”

Now, you may think that eating five, or seven or, god forbid, twelve fishes in one sitting to be, let us say, a bit odd. But it pales beside this (highly subjective) list of other peculiar holiday food traditions:

1) Pfeffernuse: I begin with the worst offender of the Christmas cookie obsession -- the pfeffernusse. First of all because it is impossible to spell. Or say. And second, because a key ingredient is pepper. In what cookie world does that make sense? Also, my husband claims that because the cookie is virtually coated with powdered sugar, “before you can even eat it, you breathe that stuff in and then choke to death.”

2) Eggnog: As the author of a novel with eggnog in the title, I have gotten an earful from my readers about the great eggnog debate, yae or nay. I’m pleased to say most are yae. Mostly because it is dessert masquerading as a before-dinner drink, as Sam points out in the book:

“I wish I’d made enough for two glasses each,” my mother said, smacking her lips in a decidedly un-regal fashion.

“No way,” I admonished her. “First of all, I’m not killing everyone’s appetites with what is essentially dessert in a glass and second of all, two rum cocktails and we’d never get this tree trimmed.”

“Nonsense,” Helene put in from her seat on the sofa next to my mother. “Drink up.”

I’m with Helene.

3) Latkes: On the plus side of holiday foods, we have the Hannukkah starter of latkes –potato pancakes fried in oil and served with sour cream. Yum. But I’d never quite understood why so much of the traditional Hannukkah foods are cooked in oil until researching this piece, when I discovered that it symbolizes the Second Temple oil that miraculously lasted eight days. Not that I’m complaining about all that frying. I’d eat an old boot if it was deep-fried.

4) Roast Goose: With so many choices for the centerpiece of the Christmas day feast – roast beef, turkey, even ham – why would you go for roast goose? I mean, aside from the fact that roast goose is delicious. My mother once decided to cook a goose for Christmas, only to come back into the kitchen to

a waterfall of goose fat streaming from the stove. That’s right – a five pound goose releases more than four cups of melted fat. So unless you want to drain the roasting pan every half hour for two hours, you might want to stick to a nice dry turkey.

5) So many desserts: Let’s start with panettone, the very dry northern Italian “cake” that comes in its own cardboard carrying case. I think it is no accident that one food historian called panettone “one of the infamous holiday sweets.” On the “infamous” list I would also include fruitcake, which is soaked in alcohol or other liquors to keep it from molding. Need I say more? Along the same lines, we have the Christmas pudding (aka figgy pudding), which I confess I love, mostly because you set it on fire. Nothing odd about that. And finally we come to my absolute favorite holiday sweet, Hannukah gelt, those little chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil. Golden chocolate. Perfect.

I’m sure you all have your own Weird Christmas food traditions. Celebrate them! They carry with them generations of family lore and love. (And remember, you can always give Aunt Ida’s fruitcake to a neighbor.)

Amy Pershing is the author of the Cape Cod Foodie Mystery series, including A Side of Murder -- which Elizabeth Gilbert called “the freshest, funniest mystery I have ever read” -- and An Eggnog to Die For -- which Kirkus Reviews called “a winner for both foodies and mystery mavens." She’s here today to talk about An Eggnog to Die For and to explore what on earth our pets must think about our holiday traditions.

You can follow Amy on her website, amypershingauthor.com, on Facebook and on Instagram and sign up for her newsletter, News from the Cape Cod Foodie, here.

An Eggnog to Die For can be ordered from: 

Amazon 

Barnes & Noble 

Bookshop