thank you for being a friend . . . and detective

When Rose Nylund’s cousin Nettie’s wedding is ruined by a fire at the venue in St. Olaf, Minnesota, Rose invites her cousin to Miami to have her wedding there. Rose is determined to make the wedding special, with all the traditions of St. Olaf, even if some of the items will be difficult to source in Florida. But she does have her best friends and roommates, Blanche, Dorothy, and Dorothy’s mother Sophia to help her. Rose plans every detail for a perfect wedding, down to making the cheesecakes for the Welcome Tea herself.

Dorothy wants to find someone to take to the wedding as her plus one. She has decided to try a new video dating service to try to find a date. She watches men present themselves over and over, and finally, towards the end of the video, she finds a man who stands out to her. Henry is handsome, like Tom Selleck without the mustache, and he is looking for someone he can talk to about books. A couple of phone calls with him, and Dorothy feels comfortable enough to meet up with him in person. They meet at a popular restaurant, but after ordering drinks, Henry goes to the bathroom and never comes back to the table. Dorothy is devastated, but she doesn’t want to let her sadness affect Rose or the wedding.

When the wedding party arrives from St. Olaf, Nettie’s fiancé Jason tells Rose a secret. He’s actually from Miami, and his parents own a hotel there. They want to host everyone for the wedding and do all the planning. He originally moved away from Miami because his parents were so controlling. He doesn’t want his parents to plan the wedding, so Rose agrees to continue with the plans but change the venue to the hotel. The ladies take all the food Rose has prepared for the Welcome Tea the next day to the hotel to store in their refrigerator overnight. It’s not until the next day that everything falls apart.

Rose and her roommates show up to the hotel in the morning and find out that they had put the food in the freezer instead of the refrigerator, so they go to take out the sandwiches and cheesecakes to let them defrost before the tea. And that’s when they find the man lying the freezer, his face in one of Rose’s cheesecakes. It’s not until the police show up and remove the man that they find a note in his pocket with Dorothy’s name on it, along with the name of the restaurant and time of their date. At that point, Dorothy realizes that the dead man is Henry. And the police realize that Dorothy is their prime suspect.

In order to save the wedding and keep Dorothy out of jail, the women realize that they will have to figure out who wanted Henry dead. They investigate everyone associated with the wedding and with the hotel, but searching for someone willing to kill means that the ladies will have targets on their backs. Will they find the killer before the killer strikes again, closer to home?

Murder by Cheesecake is a cozy murder mystery starring The Golden Girls, with all their smart-talking, sharp-dressing glory. Fans of the classic sit com can spend more time with the four women as they flirt, tell stories, eat cheesecake, and support each other. The show ran from the mid 1980s to the early 1990s, and the book is set during that same era. It tries to be sensitive to modern sensibilities, but there is a lot that is definitely of the era of shoulder pads. That makes it a little corny in places, but for me, it works, because these women could be a little corny onscreen.

I thought Murder by Cheesecake is a lot of fun. The women are back in full force, Sophia with her stories, Blanche with her flirting, Rose with her herrings, and Dorothy with her dating troubles (although the murder was new). The descriptions of their clothing felt a little over-the-top at times, but the outfits they wore on the show were as well. This book is just a celebration of all the fun, sweetness, snark, snacks, and support of The Golden Girls television show, along with a murder mystery to solve. What’s not to love?

Egalleys for Murder by Cheesecake were provided by Hyperion Avenue through NetGalley, with many thanks, but the opinions are mine.