Melanie DeLaura has to deal with a lot in her cupcake bakery. There are difficult clients, there are professional jealousies, and occasionally she gets shot at.
Mel had stayed late at Fairy Tale Cupcakes alone, as she had sent away the help she had during the day and her business partner, Angie, is still off on maternity leave. But when a bridezilla blew up at her over the wrong color fondant on her cupcakes (the bride had changed her bridesmaids’ dresses and the bride’s mother had forgotten to let Mel know until the day before the wedding), Mel took pity on the mother of the bride and stayed up to make a new batch of the fondant to fix the cupcakes.
But as she was locking up and heading home, she saw a figure in black in the back alley, and then she heard a gunshot. As the bullet shipped past her head, Mel tried to get the door back open to get to safety. But as the figure came closer and shot again, she drops her keys and couldn’t find them fast enough to get back inside. As she curls up into a ball, thinking it was the end, she heard a big crash and Oz, who lives upstairs from the bakery yells at the shooter. Mel realizes that Oz had thrown one of his potted plants at the shooter and that it had worked—the shooter was running away. Oz yelled at Mel to get back inside the bakery and call 911, and he runs after the shooter.
Since the gunshots came completely out of the blue, Mel can’t figure out who had been trying to shoot her. Oz got a look at the car the shooter drove away in, but he had no other clues for her when he came limping back to the bakery with a sore ankle. But in the past, Mel has helped solve other crimes, and she’s married to an Assistant District Attorney, so it’s possible that it’s someone from her past who is coming for revenge, or someone from her husband Joe’s past. Mel’s family doesn’t want to take any chances with her safety, so they add some personal security as well as Joe’s brothers around her to make sure danger stays away.
But when Naomi also gets shot, the business owner next door who just opened her soap store and has a resemblance to Mel. Mel worries that the shooter came back for her and had shot Naomi instead. So when the local business owners get together to talk about how to improve safety, Mel finds out that a lot of people she thought were her friends have since turned on her and want her cupcake bakery to close. After al the murders that seem to happen around Mel and her shop, they are ready to close her down. They can’t, as Mel and her partners own the building the bakery is in, but this is the first that Mel has felt any resentment towards her or Fairy Tale Cupcakes.
Mel is determined to figure this out. Who could have shot at her? She wants to find out, to make them pay for what they did to Naomi and to make sure that she and her staff are safe. And she wants to make life safer for her fellow business owners, to prove that she is an asset to the community. But that means she will have to work hard to solve the mystery before the shooter can take aim at someone else.
Strawberried Alive is the latest in Jenn McKinlay’s Cupcake Bakery Mystery series. These mysteries, based around Mel and her family and friends, are traditional cozies filled with delicious descriptions of cupcakes in every flavor imaginable. They are a light read, with gentle humor and a little romance, and with lots of warm friendships along with the murder and investigation.
I listened to this on audio, by narrator Susan Boyce. It was fun to listen to, and I felt like the time just slipped away as I got lost in the story. I have read several of these mysteries, and I always enjoy them (even though they always make me hungry). But I found Strawberried Alive to be unique. Instead of the typical story where Mel finds someone who has been killed and has to find out who the killer is, in this one, there isn’t an obvious victim, and the journey that Mel takes to figure out who the villain is different and intriguing. I thought this book was extra fun and creative for a cozy, and I think cozy fans will really enjoy how the crimes play out and how Mel brings it all together at the end. I definitely recommend this one!
A copy of the audio book for Strawberried Alive was provided by Dreamscape Media through NetGalley, with many thanks.
