Life's hard.

It's even harder when you're stupid.

John Wayne

Thursday, November 1, 2012

Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder by Joanne Fluke ★☆☆☆☆



Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder (Hannah Swensen, #1)
No Connection
Fiction – Mystery (Cozy)
436 pages
Publication Date:  April 1st 2000
Hannah Swensen #1


Hannah Swensen will never be able to look at her locally famous Chocolate Chip Crunchies again when she finds them scattered around the dead body of Cozy Cow Dairy’s deliveryman.  Asked to keep her ears open for any clues by her brother-in-law detective-hopeful Bill, Hannah takes the request several steps further and starts her own investigation, sending her into the seedy underbelly of small town Lake Eden, Michigan.


I read this book because I fell in love with title and then I saw the great reviews of it on Goodreads (by the way on a very side note goodreads.com is a excellent place to find books to read, and is usually really good at making recommendations).  You know sometimes too much information on a book can really backfire, and coming from someone like me who loves prep on most things, this is saying a lot.  After seeing some of those great reviews about it, I kind of felt like a failure and really tried to make myself like this book, putting way more effort than usual into it and way more than I should have.

It took me until chapter 15 to have any kind of buy in and in a 26 chapter book that is never a good sign.  I just couldn’t find anything witty, clever, charming or endearing about it.  I felt no connection to the story nor did it get any more appealing as finished it.  And to top it all off the ending was completely anticlimactic.  One part in the book really upset me and I still bothers me even now.  Andrea’s (Hannah’s sister and partner in crime) manipulation of her husband Bill and crying to get out of trouble was horrible.  Okay I know that this is a work of fiction, but still.

The recipes included were kind of cute, but I’m not much into baking so that didn’t do much for me either.  Some of the people who shared my aversion to this book thought the storyline too implausible, but as a fan of Sci fi, fantasy and action movies that wasn’t really a problem for me.  I have learned I can buy into anything as long as it is well done.  That just wasn’t the case here.  I almost never give only one star, but here it is.  I just didn’t like it.  In spite of my usually optimistic views of books and the belief in the redeeming qualities of trying another one in the series, there will be no more Hannah Swensen books for me!


ISBN  0758213506 (ISBN13: 9780758213501)

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