Review

Trixie Matkowski has fond childhood memories of vacationing in Sandy Harbor, New York, and now that she owns the same rustic resort at which she used to summer (and the diner next door), she’s hopeful she’ll be able to create some happy post-divorce memories there, too. She starts the season with a full reservation book, but then her inaugural guest is found murdered in his cabin and the cancellations start rolling in. Trixie’s positive the man’s death is linked to a decades-old missing persons case, but unless she can figure out who perpetrated both crimes and do so quickly, her dreams of a fresh start and a profitable future may well die on the vine.

A Second Helping of Murder is the second of Christine Wenger’s Comfort Food Mysteries. I missed Wenger’s series debut, Do or Diner, but seeing as how I love me a good food-themed cozy and Obsidian publishes some of my favorite authors, I went into this book with high hopes. Those hopes went unmet, though, and to be honest, if I hadn’t been reading this book for review, I never would have finished it. The foundations of Wenger’s whodunit are solid, but she squanders all potential with a clumsy execution. Her scenes progress arbitrarily. Her prose flows awkwardly and is riddled with exclamation points. The story is lacking in suspense, what little action Wenger writes is drowning in superfluous detail, and far too many scenes do little if anything to establish setting, develop character, or forward plot.

A Second Helping of Murder’s biggest flaw, though, may well be its heroine, whom Wenger never develops past the cardboard cutout stage. Trixie shares zero chemistry with any of the other characters in this book, her intended love interest included. Her narration is both distracting and intrusive, and her bad jokes, pointless digressions, and inane asides sap the story of narrative drive. Her attempts at sleuthing are both criminal and cringe-worthy. And while I could understand Wenger imbuing Trixie with a burning desire to solve the book’s modern-day mystery, her investigative efforts are instead inexplicably driven by a complete and total obsession with a relative stranger who went missing 25 years ago. This bizarre fixation is not only unrealistic and unearned, it borders on creepy (Think I’m exaggerating? See for yourself: “It was as if I’d lost my friend again—not that I knew Claire Jacobson to any great extent—but I just idolized her.” “The Claire of my childhood fantasies would have saved herself for Prince Charming.” “I could see all the women being jealous of Claire and all the men lusting after her.”), and a creepy protagonist is unlikely to hook the average traditional mystery reader.

Reviewed by Kat