Looking forward to shorts about China. ( )

This is a collection of short stories with herbalist China Bayles and
crew as protagonists. While the China Bayles series of mysteries is one
of my favorites, I didn't care for this book at all. The stories were
too short, there was no time to develop a mystery at all, the solutions
were abrupt, and the entire volume was chopped up with sidebars on
nearly every page with little known facts and folklore about whatever
herbs were mentioned on that page, and recipes for each and every food
dish mentioned in the stories. Many of these took up an entire page and
all of them, without fail, served to distract me from the story at hand.
Horrible format, IMO. What a waste of time! I finished it, so I'll
give it a 1, but Ms. Albert is capable of so much better than this, I'm
embarrassed for her. ( )

Herbal lore, recipes and stories intertwine in this book of short stories featuring herb shop owner and amateur sleuth China Bayles.