4.0 out of 5 stars
Turkey Flambe, Mar 15 2010
By Phineas Fogg - Published on Amazon.com
I love these type of books! A murder, travel, mystery, humor and a new recipee!--You only need chocolates to make this a perfect read! I love the way each book in this series is different from the previous one. Not only did I enjoy it, I passed it on to my sister and even my Mom liked it!
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
yawn, Dec 8 2008
By D. K. Stokes - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Three Course Murder (Mass Market Paperback)
*** Crime Brulee.
*yawn* I really don't like mysteries with gimmicks. The mystery is just an excuse to pontificate in an exceptionally boring manner about food and recipes.
The amateur sleuth's "best friend" goes missing during a scientific convention in New Orleans, but nobody's concerned except the sleuth. I didn't care about any of the characters, and the solution of the mystery was an anti-climax.
** Truffled Feathers.
Some humorous moments, which garnered this an extra half star. But otherwise, ho-hum.
This time, the first person narration goes back and forth between the chemist husband and the food writer wife. The only problem with this is that they have identical voices. The husband drones on just as boringly about food as the wife does.
Did I already mention how much I despise mysteries with a gimmick? Not only is the mystery in this one just an excuse to give excruciatingly long descriptions of every single bite of food they ate in a week, but also for obscure and pointless trivia.
If that weren't bad enough, one clue hinges on the heroine being able to distinguish between Russian and Czech in an overheard phone conversation based on helping her college roommate with vocabulary words 20 years ago. I don't think so.
And amazingly, everyone in NYC knows everyone else. The scientists the husband is meeting and the publishing people the wife is meeting all know each other, as do sundry waitresses and limo drivers.
** Death a l'Orange.
I probably should have waited to read this--I'm so tired of these tedious characters, and the errors and inconsistencies irritated me. You don't wear a "broach." In 2002, why would you bring along a printer and a fax machine to send columns to a newspaper editor instead of just emailing them? Why would a group of college professors, of all people, be shocked by statues of naked people, or not know/be shocked by beef tartare being raw? And on losing their luggage, the heroine's main complaint was that she was going to have to sleep in... *gasp* a T-shirt.
I was hoping somebody would come along and just murder the lot of them.
And that's not even getting to the story, which was a series of fairly minor "accidents," each one dissected after the fact--with charts!, interspersed with complaining, and excruciatingly detailed descriptions of food.