Finished Off in Fondant (Courtney Archer Mystery #2)

by Rosemarie Ross

Overview

Hosting a friendly competition reality cooking show could be the perfect career boost for Chef Courtney Archer—but when her co-host is found murdered, Courtney must work through layers of deception to find the real culprit.

Despite a few early hiccups, Courtney is thrilled with her starring role on The American Baking Battle, filmed at a grand resort in the Pocono Mountains. The icing on the cake? The new season has a wedding theme—complete with formalwear. But the first day on set, the producer seems to care more about profits than pastry—and the topper comes when her cohost Skylar falls ill. Little does she know things are about to end in tiers...

When a barely coherent, blood-covered Skylar is discovered at the doorway of his room, Courtney is horrified to walk inside and find a towering wedding cake—thoroughly smashed by the body of a woman in a bridal gown. Now suspicion is filling the studio and falling on Skylar, and Courtney has to look at coworkers and contestants, working through layers of deception to find the real culprit...

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781496722775
Publisher:	Kensington
Publication date:	12/01/2020
Series:	Courtney Archer Series , #2
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	257,668
Product dimensions:	4.70(w) x 6.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Rosemarie Ross is neither a chef, gourmet cook, nor television cooking star, but she loves watching them and turned that love into a cozy mystery series. Rosemarie Ross is also the pseudonym of multi-published author Rose Ross Zediker, who writes contemporary and historical inspirational romance novels which have appeared on ECPA bestseller lists and been finalists for the RITA®, National Reader's Choice, Booksellers Best, and Book Buyers Best award contests. In addition, Rose has hundreds of publishing credits in the Christian magazine genre for children and adults. Visit Rosemarie at her Website RoseMarieRoss.com or on her Facebook page, Rose Ross Zediker Author, or on Twitter @SDAuthor.

Editorial Reviews

09/11/2020

After Courtney Archer kicks off the new season of her cooking show, Cooking with the Farmer's Daughter, confessing that she's not a farmer's daughter, she fears the network will drop her. They may, if she becomes involved in one more murder, so she's assigned a security guard to keep watch over her. It's Courtney's cohost for a baking competition, though, who is in trouble. When Skylar doesn't feel good on set, he returns to his room. Courtney finds him, collapsed in the doorway, covered in blood, with a dead woman draped over a wedding cake in his room. Skylar has a history with the woman, but Courtney is convinced he didn't kill her. She spends her spare time trying to discover who else might have wanted the bride dead. Courtney juggles a murder investigation, her love life, and the TV business in this mystery set in the world of cooking competitions. VERDICT There are few surprises in this second book in the series, following Cobblered to Death. Even the killer is obvious, with no sparks to the standard romantic triangle. The mystery's appeal is solely for foodies who enjoy televised competitions.—Lesa Holstine, Evansville Vanderburgh P.L., IN

Library Journal

2020-09-02
A cooking show host’s foray into detection runs into some technical challenges.

Courtney Archer’s latest escapade begins with an apology: The host of Cooking With the Farmer’s Daughter finally admits to her audience that she grew up not on a farm but in an affluent Chicago household. While she waits to see whether her viewers will forgive her ruse, Courtney busies herself on the set of The American Baking Battle, where she serves as celebrity judge. This season’s theme is wedding fare, so it should surprise no one when Courtney stumbles across a corpse in a bridal gown facedown on a multitiered cake. Nor is it a shock when the deceased turns out to be the ex-girlfriend of Courtney’s co-star, Skylar Daily, host of Grocery Store Gambit. And as naturally as dessert follows the main course, the police home in on Skylar as their chief suspect, sending Courtney into full-bore detection mode. Against the best advice of producer Eric Iverson, who Courtney kind of hopes will be her boyfriend, and the more urgent pleas of security chief Drake Nolan, who she also kind of hopes will be her boyfriend, the amateur sleuth questions suspect after suspect, with eminently predictable outcomes. What’s harder to anticipate is the morass of misspellings, malapropisms, and grammatical glitches that confound the reader at every turn. One up-and-coming chef is described as ready “to climb one more rung” on the ladder to success. A stuffy producer “didn’t look stiff or staunchly” after the show wraps. Has computer-generated prose come to the world of cozies?

Seriously.

Kirkus Reviews