Last set from 2014

Last books from 2014 before I start the New Year. This was a curiously unsatisfactory lot, by and large.

Meet Your Baker by Ellie Alexander. Juliet is a former cruise ship pastry chef who returns to her home town to heal a broken heart and work in her mother’s bakery. Ashland is home to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, so several of the characters work at or near it. For a first mystery, this is pretty good. I think she tried to put too much into it – the forest fires were a little unnecessary and the Mia subplot didn’t help the story along. Overall, though, this isn’t a typical cozy and I like it for that. (Updated: found out the author writes another series, so it isn’t a first novel)

Monster’s Chef by Jeffrey Tervalon. A chef with a drug problem is hired to work on a music superstar’s private estate. Weirdness ensures. I debated the rating and classification on this book for quite a while. On the one hand I read it in one sitting. It was more gripping than I originally thought. None of the characters are likable (intentional, I think, on the author’s part). I didn’t see the similarity to the MJ situation that other readers saw. I didn’t care for the hallucinatory nature of sections of the book.

Bread and Butter by Michelle Wildgen. Two older brothers open a classic restaurant. The youngest opens a hipper joint a few years later. I found this book a slog. I read the first two thirds and skimmed the rest. it’s a curiously bloodless sibling rivalry. They don’t seem very interested in each other. There’s something mysteriously wrong with the youngest but no details are given. The descriptions of the restaurants and the food were fine. There just wasn’t enough to engage my attention.

Whiteout by Ken Follett. Published in 2005, it now seems kind of an average techno-thriller. A deadly virus is stolen from an isolated lab during a Christmas blizzard and the facilities director has to get it back. Two teenagers do more to retrieve the virus than she does.