The Talk-Show Murders
is the third book in the Chef Billy Blessing series by Al Roker and Dick
Lochte. Billy is in Chicago with the morning
show Wake Up, America! and has a chance
meeting with a nosy ex-cop who remembers Billy’s previous identity as a con
man. Billy paid for his crimes and reinvented himself and thought that he had
left his shady past behind him. And Eddie is willing to forget the past as
well… for a price. After meeting with Billy to share the information that he
has and to suggest a price for the blackmail, Eddie winds up dead. And Billy is
on the suspect list.
I think that this is the best book in the series so far! I
really enjoyed the characters and the witty writing and found myself laughing
out loud several times while reading the book. I did read this book on my
Kindle as a check out from my library, but even without hearing Al Roker’s
voice as the narrator on the audio version, it was easy to imagine his voice
while I read. As usual, Billy doesn’t know who to trust and ends up in a few
sticky situations. And he meets many new people, but I found it much easier to
keep everyone straight in this novel. I would definitely recommend the book!
And finally, I remembered to mark a passage that cracked me up. Billy is being stalked, dodging bullets and hiding behind a car listening to a man cross a street towards him. "Moving slowly. But irrevocably. I use words like that when I'm about to pee my pants." That is classic!!
I recently finished the latest installment of Joanne Fluke’s
Hannah mystery The Cinnamon Roll Murder. In
this book, Hannah is on her way to see a jazz band, The Cinnamon Roll Six, at
the Lake Eden Inn in the spring and
narrowly misses an multi-car pile up in the snow. Hannah and her sister decide
to see if they can help and they find the band’s bus overturned, band members
and groupies with minor injuries and the bus driver dead at the wheel. They
head to the hospital to get the keyboardist Buddy Neiman’s sprained wrist
x-rayed and treated. Everything is turning out to be a normal day in the small
town until Buddy is found by Hannah’s mother with a pair of surgical scissors
in his chest. Hannah is asked to play detective to find the killer. As if that
isn’t enough, Hannah’s friends and family insist that she fight for Norman after his
announcement at the end of the last book that he was marrying his old
girlfriend, Doctor Bev.
Thankfully, this book didn’t have me rolling my eyes as much
as the previous books in this series have. I have learned to skip through the
recipes and not even bother writing them down. I am sure that they are good,
but the recipes and the notes in the recipes are written as if a 7 year old is
reading them and following them to make something. Really, who needs to be told
repeatedly that if you can’t crack an egg without getting shell into the bowl
that you need to crack all the eggs in a separate bowl, remove the shells and
then add the eggs to the mixture. I feel like if you haven’t figured that out
by now, you probably shouldn’t be playing with the heat in an oven.
And I think that Hannah has finally made a decision about
her “love triangle.” Hopefully, it will be completely resolved in the next
book? Although, I find it very funny that she has been stringing these guys
along for years in the series and has never entertained an overnight guest who
wasn’t one of her sisters. But it is OK for Mike to sleep around with the other
girls that he dates and for Norman
to possibly have had a child with Doctor Bev when he wasn’t married? This
author needs to realize that she is not stuck in 1960 and that it is way past
the turn of the new century!
And seriously? A band named The Cinnamon Roll Six? Really? It sounds like the name of a group of grown men dressed up like junk food to dance around a stage for toddlers. Although, nowadays it would be a very popular group with the health food craze and the many changes in the food groups.
All that being said, I thought that this book was better
than some of the recent books in the series. I’m just wondering how many more
books the author can write without making a major change to something.
