tackling cupcakes and murder

When football stars Keogh Graham and Tyler Matthews decide to buy a franchise of Fairy Tale Cupcakes, everyone is a little starstruck, especially Melanie DeLaura and Angie Harper, the two women who originated the bakery. It was Mel who had quit her hated marketing job to go to cooking school in Paris, and when she moved back to Scottsdale, Angie joined her as a baking partner and her husband Tate eventually joined as their business manager.

Tate had been working with the quarterback and wide receiver to set up the franchise, so he wasn’t as surprised as Mel and Angie when the athletes walked in the doors, ready to learn the curated recipes and how to recreate them. The two stars of the Arizona Scorpions were game to learn how to bake the cupcakes and even more enthusiastic about eating them. But the opening of their store brings lots of good publicity and new customers to the Fairy Tale family.

However, it also brings some football fans who don’t want to see them distracted from the upcoming season, an angry team owner, his wife (who is also Keogh’s ex-girlfriend), and an angry agent. Keogh and Tyler just want to build a foundation for a life after retirement. Especially since Tyler has been struggling with knee issues and Keogh has had a number of concussions. But last season had brought the team close to the playoffs, and their fans and the team think that they can get the team there with one more season.

No one is more certain of this than the team’s owner, Chad Dayton. So when Keogh and Mel show up to the bakery the morning after the opening party and find Dayton on the floor, dead, they can’t believe it. And when Mel goes to check on him, to see if he is actually dead, she sees first one scorpion and then several come from his body. She jumps back, keeping a wide berth in case the scorpions are venomous. And then they wait for the police and ambulance to show up.

When it turns out that Dayton was murdered, Mel can’t seem to stop herself from trying to find the killer. She has done this once or twice before, so she knows a thing or two about an investigation. So was it Dayton’s older sons, who are angry about his new marriage to a much younger woman? Was it the new widow, who is about to inherit the football team? Was it a crazed fan? Was it Tyler, who might get cut from the team because of his knee injury? Or was it Keogh, a quarterback who wants to retire without a championship ring in order to protect his future?

Mel is busy trying to keep the cupcake displays filled in the new store without taking resources from their original store. In addition, she’s distracted by a personal issue that’s making it more difficult for her to bake. But when there’s another murder of someone close to the team, Mel knows that tackling the killer is the only way to keep Keogh and Tyler’s shop open, and to protect the reputation of Fairy Tale Cupcakes as a whole.

Fondant Fumble is book 16 in Jenn McKinlay’s popular Cupcake Bakery Mystery Series. These women know how to make a tasty cupcake, and how to track down a killer. In this book, the addition of the baking professional football players is a lot of fun, and these new characters bring lots of flavor to this cozy mystery. At the end of the book, there are also new cupcakes to try, so you can experiment with a peach cobbler cupcake, watermelon cupcake, or a chocolate pistachio covered in chocolate ganache.

I listened to the audio book for Fondant Fumble, read to perfection by Allyson Ryan. Ryan has read many of these and brings a comfort to the experience as well as some skill with reading a cozy mystery. As someone who lives in a big football town, I thought it was such a great idea to bring the footballers into the bakery and put an apron on them. Keogh’s mother also makes an appearance, and steals all the scenes she appears in, which I loved. There is a secondary plot going on that was not a surprise to me, and at first I was rolling my eyes at how it was drawn out, but then the characters got caught up to where I was with the information, and it was much more fulfilling after that. I enjoyed listening to this book a lot, and I think cozy mystery lovers will also think it’s a touchdown.

An early copy of the audio book for Fondant Fumble was provided by Dreamscape Media through NetGalley, with many thanks.