Book Review (and a Giveaway!): As the Christmas Cookie Crumbles by Leslie Budewitz

SERIES: A Food Lovers’ Village Mystery #5
GENRE: Cozy Mystery
PUBLISHER: Midnight Ink
RELEASE DATE: June 8, 2018
PAGES: 288

Erin is one smart cookie, but can she keep the holiday spirit—and herself—alive till Christmas?

In Jewel Bay, all is merry and bright. At Murphy’s Mercantile, AKA the Merc, manager Erin Murphy is ringing in the holiday season with food, drink, and a new friend: Merrily Thornton. A local girl gone wrong, Merrily has turned her life around. But her parents have publicly shunned her, and they nurse a bitterness that chills Erin.

When Merrily goes missing and her boss discovers he’s been robbed, fingers point to Merrily—until she’s found dead, a string of lights around her neck. The clues and danger snowball from there. Can Erin nab the killer—and keep herself in one piece—in time for a special Christmas Eve?

Includes delicious recipes!

Other Books In This Series

I am always ready for snow and Christmas and festive holiday food (read: cookies) so it didn’t matter to me at all that I would be reading As the Christmas Cookie Crumbles in June! Bring on the Christmas music, but please leave the earwigs at home 😛

The town of Jewel Bay, Montana is the quintessential cozy mystery small town and is the perfect spot for a Food Lover’s Village! I would love to visit the various shops, particularly the Merc that Erin owns and stocks with items (including, of course, food) from local vendors. Shops like that are right up my alley, next in line to independent bookstores, that is 😉 Erin and her family and friends and employees are realistic characters who, in spite of the quirks that go hand-in-hand with cozy mysteries, feel like people you could easily befriend in real life.

The murder mystery in As the Christmas Cookie Crumbles kept me guessing all the way until the big reveal. I changed my mind umpteen times about who I thought did it, even circling back around a time or ten to characters I thought I had already eliminated as suspects. Some of my suspicions ultimately proved right but I was also way off on a couple of points – not easy for an author to surprise me like that, considering how many Murder She Wrote, Perry Mason, and Matlock episodes I watched as a kid – not to mention all the Nancy Drew books I read back then plus all the mysteries I’ve read since. A very nicely crafted mystery plot indeed!

Bottom Line: Cute, Christmasy and cozy, As the Christmas Cookie Crumbles is entertaining and heartwarming. The murder mystery is superbly plotted out, and the town full of suspects will keep readers on their toes! Great characters to befriend and local shops to sample – this series from Leslie Budewitz has it all! (While this is the 5th book in the series, it can also be read well as a stand alone.)

(I voluntarily reviewed a complimentary copy of this book which I received from the publisher. All views expressed are only my honest opinion.)

My Rating: 4 stars / Love it!

Leslie Budewitz is the author of the Food Lovers’ Village Mysteries and the Spice Shop Mysteries—and the first author to win Agatha Awards for both fiction and nonfiction. She lives in northwest Montana with her husband, a musician, and doctor of natural medicine, and their cat Ruff, a cover model, and avid bird-watcher.

Connect with her on her website, http://www.LeslieBudewitz.com, on Facebook, or on Twitter.

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What about you? What’s your favorite Christmas cookie?