At Death's Dough

[cornerofmadness]

At Death's Dough: A Deep Dish Mystery by Mindy Quigley

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This was a 3.5 read for me but I didn't round up for a couple of good reasons. We're back in Geneva Bay WI around Valentine's Day. Having lived in WI I can attest February is a cold month, good for ice fishing which is where this all starts.

Delilah and her aunt are out ice fishing with Delilah's friend Son, and they pull up a fresh body who just so happens to turn out to be someone both Delilah and Capone know. And immediately we run into my first issue with the book. It's suffering from I'm a Cozy Mystery series syndrome by which I mean we have a whole host of secondary characters fleshing out the town and we spend 120 pages of a book not even 300 pages long doing other things. It's not even determined to be a murder (it looked like an accidental ice diving accident) until pretty much midway through the book.

I like secondary characters as much as the next person but I also don't want to wait til the halfway point for my mystery to actually start. Also if you're a Capone fan you're not going to like this one. He's nerfed for the entire book. Literally he's off the case as he's too close to it and he's not in the state 90% of the book.

Realizing that the victim died in search of treasure (which the reader knows first because of a prologue) Delilah decides she has to investigate it because a) she found the body b) it's a case related to Capone. Okay fair. Also part of it is her inability to say I'm sorry is in play and boy is that ever getting old. She keeps blaming it on being a type A personality. Sweetie, so am I in a major way but I apologize when I'm wrong or I've been a jerk.

And there is a lot of jerk behavior from a lot of people in this, especially over the plan to make a gangster history theme tour to drive business to the businesses and some are like this is so wrong to glorify them. One, who said anything about glorifying them? You can do history tours without doing that . Two, they're popular and they will bring business in (even if it might be gauche)

Delilah does her investigation with the help of friends and that part of the story is just fine and then we get to the end and wow, yeah this didn't work for me at all. I don't want to spoil it for anyone but it only works if the police chief is a total jackass (which he is in this) and no one thinks to say look we have this part of a crime recorded so why wouldn't the police believe us and help? There had to be a better way to pull off this ending. That part left me cold.

Also this is book five in case you didn't see that above so it rightfully expects you to know what's going on.

One final quibble is the same quibble I have put in every review I've done of this series, this woman is going to kill her cat with the way she feeds him. She is constantly giving the furry chonk cheese and other people food. This time she gives him chorizo. That sausage contains garlic and even small amounts of garlic can cause organ failure. There, now that's something we can all learn from even if this author/editorial team never seems to.



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