Review

For fans of:  Riley Adams

Maxie Pierce has had a crappy couple of months. First, her bank account was drained by a man she thought she loved. Then her father Jack – proprietor of Texas Jack Pierce’s Hot-Cha Chili Seasoning Palace – went missing. And now she and her uptight half-sister Sylvia are stuck keeping the Seasoning Palace afloat until Jack resurfaces and reassumes control. Maxie's (mostly) over that first thing. But the other two things would be a hell of a lot easier to deal with if she and Sylvia weren't both suspects in a murder investigation...

Chili Con Carnage is the first in Kylie Logan’s new Chili Cook-Off Mystery series, and my feelings about it are mixed. On the one hand, I kinda love that this is a small-town mystery that doesn't take place in a small town – not in the traditional sense, anyway. The community at the heart of Logan's series is the traveling Chili Showdown, and its residents are the vendors who tour the Showdown circuit. It's a fresh take on an old genre standard, and for that, I give Logan a lot of credit.

She also deserves props for creating a series heroine who isn't the stereotypical Girl Next Door. I admit, I wasn’t quite sure what to think of Maxie when I first met her; neither fresh-faced nor innocent, she’s kind of like that girl you knew in high school – you know, the one all the girls hated, in no small part because she appeared chock full of bitchy self-confidence and had a reputation for being easy? If you ever took the time to get to know that girl, though, you probably discovered that underneath her hard candy shell lay a marshmallowy center of loneliness and insecurity. Maxie Pierce is no different. She's always been a bit of an outsider – all the Showdown folks have been – and she's got a bit of a chip on her shoulder about it:

“Oh come on, Nick.” I threw my hands in the air. “Don’t play games. Tumbleweed and Ruth Ann, Gert and Jack…in my book, they’re the best of the best. Salt of the earth and all that. But I know what people think when we roll into a town. They think we’re losers. Every single one of us. Traveling around from place to place. Never settling down. We’re like gypsies without the big earrings and the tarot cards.”

That chip is like her Rosetta Stone, though – once you realize what it is and why it's there, she just makes sense, and you realize just how much you like her and are rooting for her to succeed.

But not every component of Chili Con Carnage is a success. While Maxie's complicated and often antagonistic relationship with her half-sister Sylvia is realistic, nuanced, and entertaining, the same can't be said about her interactions with potential love interest Nick. What little chemistry the two share seems bottled, and that causes the scenes in which the pair star to fall flat. Also, while Logan's central mystery is pretty solid with plenty of viable suspects and convincing red herrings, there isn't much action to speak of, making for a story that's interesting, but ploddingly paced. Throw in a conclusion that's both abrupt and unsatisfying, and you have a recipe that could use a little more tweaking.