Review

For fans of:  Alice Kimberly

A new term is about to begin at Gram’s Country Cooking School in Broken Rope, Missouri, and the women who run the school – Isabelle “Betts” Winston and her grandmother, Missouri Anna Winston – are determined to make it a success. They’ve put a lot of time and effort into selecting just the right group of students for the intensive nine-month course and are therefore thrown when a man they’ve never heard of arrives on their doorstep claiming to have received an acceptance letter. There’s no time to investigate the matter now, though, and they can’t quite bear to turn away so friendly and enthusiastic a student, so they simply add him to the roster and hope for the best.

When one of the other students is murdered on the first day of class, though, Betts and Gram are forced to wonder if they should have exercised a bit more due diligence. Something doesn’t quite ring true about the stranger’s story – but that doesn’t mean he’s a killer, does it? If the pair has any prayer of easing their consciences and continuing on with the course, they must get to the bottom of this mystery, and quickly…

If Bread Could Rise to the Occasion is the third of Paige Shelton’s Country Cooking School Mysteries, and while not perfect, this book has a lot going for it. First and foremost on the list of positives is the series conceit:  that Betts and her grandmother are the only ones in Broken Rope who can communicate with the spirits who haunt the old Wild West town. I love that neither Betts, nor her grandmother, nor the ghosts themselves know the rules that govern their interactions; every time somebody thinks they’ve figured out the rules, Shelton shakes things up on them, which is a great way to keep the series fresh and interesting.  Also in the plus column is the town of Broken Rope, itself; the setting is fun and unique and plays such a large role in every story Shelton tells that it’s practically a character in its own right. And finally, I sincerely appreciate the way Shelton manages to incorporate the everyday business of the cooking school into her tales; I learned more about sourdough starters from Betts and her grandmother than I did the 200-page bread bible I got for Christmas last year, and I had fun doing it, to boot.

Like the other books in this series, If Bread Could Rise to the Occasion actually has two mysteries at its core – one centering on a present-day murder, and one centering on a historical murder that was never solved. In theory, it's a structure that should be conducive to quick pacing and a complex plot; unfortunately, however, Shelton doesn't quite nail the execution. Both mysteries start strong but grow too convoluted to be plausible; the historical mystery quickly overshadows the present-day one, sapping the story of some of its immediacy; and neither mystery has a satisfying conclusion.

Also, while I’ll grant that giving Betts two love interests – one human (and ghost-ignorant) and one spectral – is a great way to introduce conflict, I feel like too much of If Bread Could Rise to the Occasion is dedicated to this angle. At times, the book feels more like a paranormal romance than a mystery, and that’s not what I look for in a Berkley Prime Crime release.

Reviewed by Kat