This wasn't too bad of a book. It's got a couple amateur detectives bumbling through a search for a criminal, while people are dying all around them. The police don't seem particularly incompetent, nor do the detectives spend half the novel hiding details from the reader. On the downside, the solution comes as a surprise to detective and reader.

To me, it boiled down to liking the characters and how they interacted in their quaint small town. (Which seemed bizarrely dissimilar to my experiences in a town of about the same size; how does a 23-room inn end up the largest employer in a town of 4000?) I didn't feel like I had wasted my time at the end of the book, but the story did feel a little weak, and I'm not looking for the rest of the books in this series to read. ( )

These series concerns the Quilliam sisters: Sarah and artist, Meg, a master chef. After Sarah's divorce and the death of Meg's husband, the two move to Hemlock Falls, a small town in New York to run a bed and breakfast.

The individual stories can be charming in a screwball sort of way, but I find them dull after a while. Either things stay infuriatingly the same, or they change in a bizarre abrupt fashion; there is no real development. Of course, my disinterest in gourmet cooking doesn't help.

The volumes usually include at least one recipe. ( )