February 2012 Mystery Books & Reviews

Review

It’s Zydeco Cakes owner Rita Lucero’s first carnival season in New Orleans, and it doesn’t seem like life could possibly get any more hectic. On top of their usual orders for wedding cakes and birthday cakes, the bakery has King Cake orders coming out of their ears, and somehow, Rita has to find time to design a Zydeco Cakes website and host a huge pre-Mardi Gras gala for her late husband’s old krewe. She’s had to work around the clock, but seems to have everything under control – until, that is, her Uncle Nestor and Aunt Yolanda show up at her door for a surprise visit. Rita doesn’t exactly have the time to socialize, but she can’t turn away the people who raised her, and how much trouble could her aunt and uncle be, anyway?

Unfortunately, it turns out the answer to that question is “a lot.” The pair accompanies her to the party, but Uncle Nestor spends the night being surly and manages to get into a fistfight with local celebrity Big Daddy Boudreaux just hours before the man is found dead in the pool. A lot of people had cause to want Big Daddy dead and Rita knows her uncle is incapable of murder, but that doesn't stop the NOPD from placing him at the top of their suspect list. And so now Rita's forced to find a way to squeeze yet one more item onto her to-do list: catch a killer and prevent her uncle from going to prison for a crime he didn't commit.

Cake on a Hot Tin Roof is the second of Jacklyn Brady’s Piece of Cake Mysteries, and while I genuinely enjoyed her series debut, A Sheetcake Named Desire, I daresay her sophomore effort is even better. The plot is engrossing, the pace is rapid-fire, and the mystery is complex without being convoluted. Brady’s prose is vibrant, bestowing her writing with a strong sense of atmosphere; New Orleans isn’t just the setting of her tale, it’s a central character. The way she describes the streets of the city during Mardi Gras makes you feel like you’re experiencing it firsthand, and Brady manages to flavor her tale with a healthy dose of carnival-related history and trivia without making the delivery of this information feel like an info dump. I daresay I learned more about the Big Easy and its traditions from reading this book than I did by traveling to the city itself, and for that, Brady deserves an huge amount of credit.

Brady’s created a very well-rounded cast of characters with which to populate her tale. Rita's a strong, ambitious, and thoroughly likable heroine, secretly quite insecure about her ability to succeed in the business she’s inherited from her ex-husband, but determined to make a go of it. Her former mother-in-law and business partner, Miss Frankie, is gracious, charming, and lends warmth and energy to every scene in which she appears. Rita’s curmudgeonly Uncle Nestor is so fully realized you can practically feel him glaring up at you from the page. And the larger-than-life Big Daddy Boudreaux is so loud and obnoxious that you’ll find yourself rooting for his demise from the moment you make his acquaintance.

Bummed you weren’t able to make it down to Louisiana to celebrate Fat Tuesday? Fret not: just run down to your local bookstore and pick up a copy of Jacklyn Brady’s Cake on a Hot Tin Roof. It’ll cost you less than a round of hurricanes, it won’t give you a hangover, and trust me when I tell you that wherever you choose to do your reading will smell a heckuva lot better than a night on Bourbon Street.

Reviewed by Kat