Light murder mystery romance. The recipes and pairing of wine is an interesting addition. ( )

wine, amateur-sleuth, women-sleuths, twisty, family-dynamics *****

Just when Nikki has come to grips with the realization that she is not much as an actress and that she feels better at her paying job she gets fired. Miraculously, the other customer is impressed with her skills at pairing wine with food and offers a job doing a similar job along with organizing and also plugging the leak in the finances in his winery. So she goes along to check things out, and before two days have passed, she has discovered two bodies and a book full of suspects. Let the sleuthing begin!
Fascinating read complete with gourmet recipes! ( )

I enjoyed this book. I'm not a wine-lover, but I did enjoy learning about various wines. I did think that the recipes and wine pairings might be a bit overdone. For me, they interrupted the story. I did not guess the murderers until it was revealed. I liked that there were several crimes going on that had different perpetrators.

My biggest concern is how the author will sustain the series--unless she plans to have Nikki investigate other crimes/mysteries that don't involve murder. In real life, if a winery had quite a few murders attached to it, I can't imagine that people would still want to go there or buy wine from there--or at least not enough people to keep the winery solvent. ( )

Nikki Sands gets fired from her waitressing job and Derek Malveaux asks her to consider working for him at his winery. Once Nikki arrives at the winery she finds the body of the wineries vitner in the bushes and she starts investigating the crime. Some of the writing about the relationship between Derek and Nikki was too cheesy for me and the solution to the mystery involved a lot of unbelievable coincidences. ( )

Synopsis: Nikki Sands is a waitress and aspiring actress with two less than promising career paths. During a particularly bad waitressing experiences she meets Derek Malveaux, the owner of a vineyard. He offers her a job, but what she gets is a double homicide and almost becomes a victim, herself.
Review: Although parts of this are a bit far-fetched, the story hangs together well. The characterizations are well done and the two main characters are sympathetic. Interesting and nicely written, it was a good book. ( )