Death By Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake

OK, so some days I do think enjoying myself and eating all the delicious foods I want would not be such a bad way to go, forget about weight control and healthy diets and all that... but in the end like eating all those high calorie foods where you just feel sick the next morning and regret it, Death By Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake by Sarah Graves, is fun for a while, but in the morning you may wish you had spent the time reading a different book.

If you are sitting in the shade of a big old tree, or under the umbrella at the beach, dive right in.  Enjoy the light entertaining mystery for an afternoon.  In this first in a new series of Chocolate Mysteries, author Sarah Graves, takes her amateur detective, Jacobia, "Jake" Tiptree from her previous series of Home Repair is Homicide mysteries, and brings her to a new career as the owner of a small bake shop.

Jake lives in a waterfront, tourist location in Maine and though she has had many run-ins with murder while fixing up her old home, now she and her friend are starting up the chocolate shop and have already found a dead body.  Of course, they feel pressure to solve the crime because they feel the local police are busy elsewhere and will not be able to clear their names in time.

 The most clever thing that Graves has accomplished with this novel, is that she has taken her characters from one series that must have outlived its plots and moved them into a new arena that will open up the possibilities for trouble.  But otherwise, this is not a compelling mystery novel.  The plot is very typical and the dialogue repetitive.   They describe the details of making the cheesecakes over and over. They keep running between the house and the bakery, sometimes it seems needlessly just for some action.  The clues become too obvious as the author keeps repeating them which makes them so clear you know what will happen next before it does.  Finally the characters are flat.  The suspense never really feels authentic.  So though it is a light read for an afternoon, when your book pile is very tall and precariously balanced, this may be a book or series that can be used to at the bottom so the rest of the pile does not tip over.