booktastic

Okay, this year I have had a propensity for picking up series mysteries - and starting with the wrong one. This one wasn’t entirely my fault. I was looking for a book to download and listen to from the Chicago Public Library website - I was hoping to try one of those “The Cat Who…” books, but the earliest one in the series they had was 13 or something, and that’s just a bit too late in the series. Finally, after clicking through several pages of “If you like this book, you will also like..” I saw this, and there was no indication of whether it was the first, third or seventh in the series.

So I looked it up. Turns out The Cereal Murders was the third in the series. I remembered this book from a previous encounter: I was in the basement of Powell Books in Hyde Park Chicago (a marvelous used book store: I recommend it. It seems to go on forever) looking for inexpensive things to read, and saw this on a shelf. I contemplated it because the cover appealed to me, but I wasn’t really into mysteries at the time, and put it back.

I was reminded of that when I was on the library website, and decided to download the book. After all, it was only third in the series, that wasn’t so bad.

It’s an audiobook. (I apologize to those of you who don’t consider listening to audiobooks as “reading” - it’s really my only option at work, since if I sat there at the computer with a novel in hand my bosses might get suspicious). The thing about audiobooks is, I have begun to be of the notion that a lot of how much one enjoys an audiobook is due to how good the reader is. If the reader doesn’t quite work for you, it winds up being very distracting from the book. On a recent audiobook, I was distracted the every time she tried to do a “male” voice. All her “men” sounded exactly the same - because it was just her, the reader, doing a gruff, gravelly voice. Well, not all men are gruff and gravelly.

However, the reader for this book was very good. She didn’t try to “sound like” a man when she read the male parts - she just changed her tone or inflection, which worked beautifully. The only part where I was distracted by the author herself was when she had to re-enact someone’s scream and death gurgle (which she did quite well, I might add. It did make me laugh, but just because it was unexpected)… but, if that’s how it was written, that’s how she had to do it, so I don’t fault her that one.

Anyways, I suppose I’d better talk about the book itself. I enjoyed it! It’s the story of a caterer who becomes involved with a bizarre higher-education-related murder when, at an event she is catering, she finds the dead body of the valedictorian. Our heroine is Goldy Bear (yeah, yeah, perhaps the naming of characters in the book didn’t always work for me, but what can you say? That’s a minor issue), and the story is told from her viewpoint, first person (which helped the audiobook, I might add). The mystery was enough a focal-point of the story that I didn’t spend a whole lot of time wondering when she was going to get back to mystery solving… And the climax of the book was the solving of the mystery, and it was exciting. Although perhaps I wasn’t paying as much attention to the mystery element as I should have because I was distracted by another element.

Our heroine is a caterer, and spends the majority of the book talking about food. Manicotti, extreme nachos, chocolate dipped biscotti, slices of sourdough bread slathered with pesto… *Passes out, revives self several minutes later and goes on.* I was sitting there at work listening to this book and literally salivating. Now, I’m not sure how it would have come across if I’d read the book: there’s a certain amount of your reaction which is dictated by a reader when you listen to the audiobook rather than reading the novel itself. It could be she just made it all sound really good with her tone and inflection. But I can say this: I wanted to go home and cook. As an added bonus, this book includes the actual recipies for the most prominent foods mentioned. I didn’t listen to them (honestly, what fun is listening to a recipe? “Two cups flour. Two teaspoons cinnamon. One teaspoon sugar…”) - but now I want to buy (or bookmooch, or library) a copy so that I can check those recipes out.

So if you like food and enjoy cooking and reading mysteries, I can recommend this novel. I finished it at work today and promptly came home and made Alfredo pasta from scratch, and served it over some store-bought noodles that my Mother assured me were almost as good as “home made” - and they were. All and all, today brought both good reading and eating experiences. — Mrs. Hall