EASY BAKE COVEN

Katie Lightfoot's tired of loafing around as the assistant manager of an Ohio bakery. So when her aunt Lucy and uncle Ben open a bakery in Savannah's quaint downtown district and ask Katie to join them, she enthusiastically agrees.

While working at the Honeybee Bakery—named after Lucy's cat—Katie notices that her aunt is adding mysterious herbs to her recipes. Turns out these herbal enhancements aren't just tasty—Aunt Lucy is a witch and her recipes are actually spells!

When a curmudgeonly customer is murdered outside the Honeybee Bakery, Uncle Ben becomes the prime suspect. With the help of handsome journalist Steve Dawes, charming firefighter Declan McCarthy, and a few spells, Katie and Aunt Lucy stir up some toil and trouble to clear Ben's name and find the real killer....

Series: Magical Bakery

Review

For fans of:  Melissa Bourbon, Heather Blake, and Madelyn Alt

When Katie Lightfoot’s Aunt Lucy and Uncle Ben announce their plans to open a bakery in downtown Savannah and ask Katie to help them run the place, it’s like Katie’s prayers have been answered; she’s been itching for a fresh start since her ex-fiancé called off their wedding, and it’s not like the long hours and crappy pay offered by the Akron bakery at which she’s now employed are enough to keep her in Ohio.

At first, the move South seems like a charmed one:  Katie’s aunt and uncle give her the warmest of welcomes, she finds an adorable old carriage house to call home, and the plans for the bakery are proceeding according to schedule.  Sure, she keeps catching her aunt muttering strange things over the mixing bowl, and the women in Lucy’s “book club” are a bit odd and don’t seem all that keen on discussing the latest fiction, but so what?

Then, however, the most odious woman in town gets herself killed in front of the business just days before they open their doors – and just minutes after having a very public argument with Uncle Ben – and everything starts to go off the rails.  Can Katie exonerate Ben, catch the real killer, and still manage to give the Honeybee Bakery the kind of grand opening it needs to be a success, or will poking her nose where it doesn’t belong bring an end to her new life before it can even begin?

Brownies and Broomsticks is the first in Bailey Cates’ new Magical Bakery Mystery series, and if the quality of her debut is any indication, it won’t be the last.  The pace is quick, the story is whimsical and fun, and Cates does a great job of introducing you to her own unique brand of magic.  Her prose has a nice flow to it; Cates’ descriptions – particularly of people and of food – are so lush and vivid that the people practically leap off the page and you can almost taste the cheddar-sage scones and ginger-molasses muffins; and the fictional world she’s created is warm, inviting, and dripping with sultry Savannah charm and mystique.  This book doesn’t contain a lot of action and you never get the feeling that Katie’s in any real peril, but Cates’ tale is no less interesting for it, and the mystery is more than clever enough to hold the reader’s interest straight on through to the final page.

Katie’s a very winsome, girl-next-door kind of heroine, and the fact that she wants desperately to believe in magic and witchcraft but still has a hard time silencing her inner skeptic makes her all the more relatable.  I’m occasionally irritated by the presence of love triangles in cozies, particularly when one of the potential love interests is clearly much more well-suited for the heroine than the other, but Cates uses the configuration to good effect here.  Katie has great chemistry with both bad-boy reporter (and male witch) Steve and family-friend-slash-firefighter (and all-around good guy) Declan, and the fact that the men can’t stand to be in the same room with one another helps give the book some much-needed tension.  Katie’s familiar, a Cairn terrier hilariously named Mungo the Magnificent, is adorable and entertaining and brings a smile to every scene in which he appears.  And I find it incredibly refreshing that the fact that the only member of the police force with a speaking role in the story, Detective Peter Quinn, is neither a love interest nor a strict antagonist – he’s just a reasonable human being and a good cop who’s determined to do his job to the best of his abilities.

I do wish Cates had put a little more effort into fleshing out Uncle Ben, Aunt Lucy, and the members of Lucy’s coven; they’re not so underdeveloped as to be two-dimensional, but they do tend to fade into the background a bit and occasionally function more like a Greek Chorus than a fully realized cast.  That’s a minor complaint, however, and I have a feeling that as Katie becomes better acquainted with these characters over the course of the series, we will, as well.

Reviewed by Kat N.

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