New York Times bestselling author Laura Childs presents the best way to start your day— with a hearty breakfast and a side of hard-boiled murder.

Suzanne, Toni, and Petra found a second life after losing their husbands—opening their own successful business, the Cackleberry Club cafè. But the three women never expected sleuthing to be the special of the day…

A KILLER HAS THE TOWN WALKING ON EGG SHELLS

When a snowmobile crashes into the woods behind the Cackleberry Club cafè, Suzanne finds her town’s most-hated banker beheaded by a wire staked in the snow. Now some of her best customers are prime suspects with a bushel of motives, and the murder investigation is snowballing. An elusive young runaway may be the Cackleberry Club’s only way to crack the case…provided Suzanne can keep her head long enough to track down the cold-blooded killer.

Series: A Cackleberry Club Mystery

Review

Kindred’s Fire and Ice Festival is right around the corner, and Cackleberry Club owner Suzanne Dietz is hard at work planning the Festival’s finale. Local bank president Ben Busacker has agreed to help her hammer out the details, but then Ben goes and gets himself killed in a snowmobiling accident – beheaded, actually, by a wire strung across the trail – and suddenly, Suzanne finds herself with twice the work instead of half. The local police are clueless, and Suzanne’s not about to let them arrest an innocent person for murder, so now not only does she have to throw a giant party all by her lonesome, she has to catch a killer, as well.  

Stake & Eggs is the fourth of Laura Childs’ Cackleberry Club Mysteries. It’s the first in the series that I’ve read, and I can almost guarantee it’ll be the last. Childs’ writing style has always been flowery, but she outdoes herself in Stake & Eggs. The prose is cluttered with ridiculous modifiers (“vomited softly”? SERIOUSLY?) and superfluous details (why do I need to know how many points Wine Spectator awarded the bottle of wine they’re drinking with dinner or the brand of the appliances in Suzanne’s kitchen?), and too many scenes do little if no work to develop the story or its characters. The dialogue is awkward.  The pace is painfully slow; the plot is boring, unfocused, and progresses arbitrarily; and there’s zero narrative drive.  The mystery is hastily sketched, with no real clues or viable suspects, and takes such a back seat to the book’s other storylines that you occasionally forget its existence.  Childs fails to make the reader care whodunit or why or whether the culprit gets caught. And the ending is not only anticlimactic, but is downright hokey; the theme music from the Benny Hill Show would not be an entirely inappropriate accompaniment.

Suzanne is an inoffensive enough heroine, but Childs makes no real effort to develop her or any of the other cast members beyond the cardboard cutout stage.  Almost all of the characters are either insultingly folksy and stupid or are stereotypical mustache-twirling villains. I do like the sense of camaraderie between Suzanne and her two best friends and business partners, Toni and Petra, but not enough is made of their relationship to do any real work towards redeeming this book.

My advice?  If you’re a die-hard fan of the Childs’ Cackleberry Club Mysteries, then by all means, go ahead and buy Stake & Eggs; if you’re a cozy reader just looking for a new series, however, you should probably skip this one. 

Reviewed by Kat

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