Clearly, I'm a big of the cozy mystery genre. I enjoy the predictability to an extent, and I enjoy the situations and quirky characters. I love not having to fully invest my thoughts into it. If I'm not in an overly sappy mood, but need some distraction, cozy mysteries are where I go- either through television, movies, or books. I'm willing to forgive poor writing to a certain extent to get this. I'm not looking for Shakespeare here, I'm looking for something that will take my mind off of my own life. The Chocolate CHip Cookie Murder went beyond my limit though. The most unforgivable aspect was the characterization The characters weren't even characters! They were simply names. No one had any semblance of a personality, so all of the quirk and determination I look for in my plucky hero/heroine was missing. The dialogue was horrendous. While I fully admit that I'm a terrible writer, even I could have written more believable dialogue than that. If the author had tried reading it out loud, even she would have had to cringe. The constant over-explanations drove me batty. I actually do like when mystery authors do summations of information you know throughout the book, as it reminds me of what I've forgotten. It's more than excessive to do so after every paragraph. Literally, it would be one paragraph of action, one paragraph summing up the action, and then another paragraph summing up the summation of the action in context. Every time she mentioned her "notebook", I wanted to just skip the paragraph. It was excruciating.
To top off all of that, the lack of believability of the entire book drove me crazy. The main character is supposed to know how to solve a murder better than the police. Instead of, I don't know, telling her to butt the hell out, the police let her act like an officer. There was no real sneaking behind their backs, it was all very out front and put on display. At least shows like Castle have Castle act subservient to the real police when it comes to interviews. If she had been merely suggesting information, or doing it entirely behind the police officer's back, then I would have a heck of a lot less problem with it. Not only was that driving me crazy the whole book, but her reactions to everything drove me crazy. Oh yes, a battered woman that you've never spoken to would pour her heart and soul to you. And no, no one would ever guess you're working on the case when you're asking everyone questions. The "romance" at the end was just the icing on the cake. It greatly resembled the kinds of things I wrote in my diary at, oh, I don't know, age eleven. I'm not even joking. My writing skills may have even been better than this book at that age.
What makes this all worse is that this book was on my hold list for months. That means there were countless readers who were subjected to this horrible story. I was so excited- baking and mysteries rolled into one- you can't get much better than that! Well, you could definitely do better than this book.
The only redeeming quality about this book was the recipes- although I wouldn't be surprised if those were utter crap as well.
I cannot recommend this book to anyone, it was that annoying. The only reason I finished was because there was supposedly a surprising twist. It wasn't. The scene where she solves the murder and confronts the villain was so incredibly cheesy, I couldn't stand it. I had to actually put the book aside for a while before I could finish the epilogue. Yuck.
(1/5 stars)
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