Category: Mysteries

 

The follow up to the first Tannie Maria mystery, Recipes for Love and Murder, this sophomore entry started off with the same lyrical voice and fabulous atmosphere, but a very disjointed plot.

As the synopsis says, the satanic mechanic is a counsellor specialising in PTSD, whom Tannie Maria consults about her past as an abused spouse.  But he doesn’t make an entrance into the story until Chapter 24, page 92. In the meantime, the book starts almost immediately with the murder of a tribal man whose tribe just won a major land case against a diamond mining company and a cattle company.  He’s poisoned right in front of Tannie Maria and her now-boyfriend Henk, the chief detective.  Her experience with food and cooking gives her the ability to spot how he was poisoned and this opens a rift between her and Henk.

This murder has, seemingly, nothing to do with the satanic mechanic, but his reputation as a suspected former satanist makes everybody suspicious, though Tannie Maria finds her group sessions to be the only thing that’s helped her to date, and several incidents, including another murder in the middle of a group session keeps the focus on the titular character.

Everything comes together in the end, but the journey is not, from a writing perspective, a smooth one.  The connections revealed at the end make complete sense, but getting there was a clumsy exercise in plotting.

The romance started off a bit sweet – in a good way – but veered into the eye-rolling with Henk’s manufactured drama.  I realise attractiveness is entirely subjective, but the author seems to delight in creating male characters that not only defy common stereotypes of attractiveness, but are firmly planted as far away from them as realistically possible.  But perhaps I’m totally wrong, and waxed handlebar moustaches and hirsute men are what’s hot in South Africa.  It matters little, as the characters are all well drawn with magnetic, if not attractive, personalities.

Once again though, what pretty much kept me glued to the page is the evocative atmosphere of the Klein Karoo and the little side stories that develop from letters written to Tannie Maria in her role as Advice and Recipe columnist.  I also enjoyed the somewhat spiritual, somewhat hallucinogenic connections with the African wildlife.

A lot of these first two books is built around Tannie Maria as a victim of spousal abuse (the spouse is dead when the series begins), but by the end of this book, she’s well on her way to putting herself back together, which makes me curious about what kind of book the third one will be.  It’s out now, but my library doesn’t currently have it.  Might have to go on the to-buy list for 2022.

 

Sadly average, even for modern cozy mysteries.

I was drawn in by the premise – brewing is all the rage in cozies at the moment, but this was the first moonshine book I’ve seen, and I liked the cover.

Unfortunately, the characters were just a little too storybook-dimensional; the good ones were just too good and the bad ones were ridiculous.  The MC started off being determined to ‘find the killer’ – which turns me off; I prefer the sleuths that are more inadvertent in their investigations.  But Kelly then puts the MC in a perfectly plausible situation for investigating, so I thought it might be ok – and then she activates the TSTL trope and I was back to irritated.  Top this off with a very childish grandfather and the whole thing just didn’t ring my bell.

Diane Kelly has written several previous series, and at least one of them was enjoyable, but this one is, despite its premise, just too formulaic.