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marlynb's review
3.0
This is the Gourmet Girl mystery series co-written byJessica Conant-Park and her mother, Susan Conant. Our heroine Chloe Carter tags along with her boyfriend chef Josh Driscoll as he films an episode of a "battle of the chefs"-style television series. They choose a random shopper at an upscale market to be the recipient of a home-cooked gourmet dinner, but the fun is spoiled when the shopper's wife dies a painful death during the meal. Josh is not a suspect, but having been the only person to witness the death, Chloe feels that she must discover whodunnit.
jenniferdenslow's review
3.0
Another "gourmet girl" mystery finds Chloe Carter gearing up for her best friend's wedding---but murder interferes! The "reality" in "reality show" gets too real and Chloe's chef boyfriend is caught in a murder investigation. The solution is obvious pretty early on for an experienced mystery reader. The recipes at the end of the book for food within it sound tasty, but they are definitely the kind I want someone else to cook for me, not stuff I'd cook myself!
hugbandit7's review
4.0
am hoping this series isn't ending. remember reading a newsletter from the author that the series wasn't renewed by the publisher....hope they renew it after the next book!
kindleandilluminate's review against another edition
1.0
I never read this kind of book, but I got it as a blind date with a book thing at the library, so... Unfortunately, not the kind of blind date that gets a second date. Cardboard characters, stilted dialogue, plot twists you can see from a mile away, and, yeah, I know this is the Gourmet Girl series, but do we really need 25% of the word count to be detailed yet flatly prosaic descriptions of food? This has got to be the least appetizing, least image-rich food description in any book I've ever read. And it's such a huge chunk of the novel! The murder was almost secondary to the "and then I ate lobster ravioli and a pumpkin soup with homemade croutons and..." lists. Like, "Oh, and then I figured out X was the murderer and maybe my life was in danger. What a dopey nutball X was. Back to the pesto!"
Chloe Carter is such a nonentity of a protagonist, I don't even have any angry words to allot to her. She's just a blank space where a character should be.
Also, was that love triangle supposed to actually be a triangle or...? Hunky Not-Boyfriend shows up, like, twice, and then all of a sudden is revealed to be OUT OF NOWHERE and with NOTHING to do with any of the rest of the story except the arbitrary cat plotline (someone once told this author to include details. Alas, she did), abusive to animals and a creep just...because. Is there some secret metaphor I'm missing? Is the metaphor, "the lamb chop with arugula pesto may look appetizing, but it's hiding a deadly poison, and by lamb chop I mean hot guy and by deadly poison I mean contrived last second excuse to remind protag that her boyfriend is a Nice Guy"?
By the way, that sentence is literally the plot. There you go, I just saved you the trouble of reading it.
Chloe Carter is such a nonentity of a protagonist, I don't even have any angry words to allot to her. She's just a blank space where a character should be.
Also, was that love triangle supposed to actually be a triangle or...? Hunky Not-Boyfriend shows up, like, twice, and then all of a sudden is revealed to be OUT OF NOWHERE and with NOTHING to do with any of the rest of the story except the arbitrary cat plotline (someone once told this author to include details. Alas, she did), abusive to animals and a creep just...because. Is there some secret metaphor I'm missing? Is the metaphor, "the lamb chop with arugula pesto may look appetizing, but it's hiding a deadly poison, and by lamb chop I mean hot guy and by deadly poison I mean contrived last second excuse to remind protag that her boyfriend is a Nice Guy"?
By the way, that sentence is literally the plot. There you go, I just saved you the trouble of reading it.
readclever's review
2.0
This was my second attempt at reading the Gourmet Girl series. I picked the book out off the library shelves because the reality show premise really worked for me. Unfortunately, it feels like Chloe is never going to grow into a deeper character than her introduction in Steamed. I wanted to like the plot but I gave up about one-third into the book. So I pushed to the last 30-40 pages to see what happened. About what I suspected and without a lot of convincing evidence on why. I wish the book had focused more on creating better villains. Too cookie cutter.
readclever's review against another edition
2.0
This was my second attempt at reading the Gourmet Girl series. I picked the book out off the library shelves because the reality show premise really worked for me. Unfortunately, it feels like Chloe is never going to grow into a deeper character than her introduction in Steamed. I wanted to like the plot but I gave up about one-third into the book. So I pushed to the last 30-40 pages to see what happened. About what I suspected and without a lot of convincing evidence on why. I wish the book had focused more on creating better villains. Too cookie cutter.
kalikabali's review
2.0
A book that combines both food writing and crime should have been just down my lane, except that it wasn't. The writing style was simply boring, the story didn't have a punchline (unless you count the departure to hawaai in the end as one) and the most obnoxious character is the one who did it. The end looks like as if the authors feared that they would annoy half their readers no matter what their heroine decided to do, and so left it dangling there.
Why am I giving it 2 stars? Because it actually has at the end the recipes for the dishes in the story. They do look quite interesting.
Why am I giving it 2 stars? Because it actually has at the end the recipes for the dishes in the story. They do look quite interesting.
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