Library Book sale. $2 a bag (31 books). West Kildonan branch.

Angie Amalfi’s new cake business, Comical Cakes, is taking off. She creates cakes in various humorous shapes for her clients. Her boyfriend, a homicide detective, is investigating a serial killer who’s apparently from the “goth” world. He’s supposed to be solving the case, but his mind is elsewhere.

I expected this to be a nice cozy mystery. It wasn’t, well, not quite anyway. It appeared to be two very different, contrasting stories woven together. There were the light, cozy, funny parts with Angie and Connie and the dark, demonic, goth parts with the murders, vampires and the Baron. The two sides come together basically through Angie when she becomes a potential victim.

I’ve read other reviews (some here at Bookcrossing) and some reviewers described the book as a fun and fluffy mystery. Well, maybe I took it too seriously, but I can’t imagine a book being fun and fluffy when a serial killer is cutting the hearts out of young women.

That being said, I did enjoy reading this book. The story was interesting (albeit dark) and had tons of cool characters.

Angie, however, was too self-centred for me. I would have advised Paavo to think about his proposal long and hard before delivering it. He had reservations and his fiancée barely gave him the time of day? Time to move on Paavo. Hey, maybe that’s just me. Since this is the first book I’ve read in the series (it’s the ninth of twelve), I’m sure there are some details of the relationship that I’m missing that may, at some point, convince me otherwise.

The last page of the book is missing. It didn’t contain the story but it did have the second page to a recipe for “Angie’s Mocha Pecan Torte”. It appears to have been torn out. Who would tear out a second page to the recipe? My guess is that there was something on the backside of the page that the reader wanted. Perhaps it contained another recipe. Whatever the reason, ripping pages out of books is not very nice.

I have at least one other book by Pence on my shelf. I think I’ll wait to read it before finding more. If the next one has a “dark side” to it, I may not want to read anymore. Maybe...

RELEASE NOTES:

Left the book on the ledge by the windows on the way out of the store.