Ill-Fated Fortune

[cornerofmadness]

Ill-Fated Fortune: A Magical Fortune Cookie Novel by Jennifer J. Chow

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Thanks to Netgalley for the arc of this magic realism mystery. For me this is rounded up from 3.5 stars.

Felicity Jin's family legacy is being able to bake their happiness into their signature pastry. Mom keeps Gold Bakery afloat with pineapple buns and egg custards among other things. Felicity hasn't evidenced any ability in this arena and the young woman's role in life is a bit shaky until she finally discovers her pastry: the fortune cookie. Even more awesome in her eyes is that she seems able to write fortunes that come true. This joy lasts until the fortune cookie king is found dead in the dumpster behind the bakery with a grim handwritten fortune. Naturally Detective Sun makes Felicity the prime suspect (also probably worth mentioning, in Pixie, CA, the Jins and Felicity's bff, the florist, Kelvin work in the predominately Asian part of town and Sun is from nearby Fresno).

Trying to clear her name and given that her worry over being the prime suspect is affecting her magic, Felicity starts poking around, leading her to a Chinese restaurant and some Asian markets (all of which she wants to try to set up her cookies with) and to the dreary factory, Smiley Fortunes, owned by the self-crowned cookie king. She finds no end of people with motives, especially since his cookies suck and he was a nasty boss. However, convincing Detective Sun of this isn't easy.

Woven into this is another victim of his crappy cookies, a bride to be whose bachelorette party ended up with severe food poisoning to the extent her wedding had to be moved and she's suing, starts arranging her wedding do -over with Kelvin (which brings him even more fully into the mystery).

The mystery itself wasn't bad. There were enough suspects though a few more might have worked out better. We don't really get a good feel for Detective Sun though. I really liked Kelvin. Felicity isn't bad either, though she does tend to whine a bit.

On the negative side, I think the 'oh is my magic gone' scenes are a bit repetitive (there seems to be quite a few of them at least) and I was a little confused at the killer's motivation (or at least why didn't they turn to the cops as some of what Cookie King was doing was sketchy to say the least).

I would, however, read another one so that says something for the series.

As a side note, not taken into consideration in the review, I'm not sure what was wrong with my arc but hopefully when this releases into the wild, Minotaur has this fixed. About four chapters in my e-copy had issues. It would repeat one page and then the following page was missing (so instead of it going pg 1-2-3 I'd get two page 1s no 2 and right on to 3). That was annoying but that's not the author's fault.



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