Review – Cooking the Books

It's not easy being Sloane Templeton. After her mother dies from a heart attack, Sloane Templeton goes from Cyber Crimes Unit to bookstore owner before she can blink. She also "inherits" a half-batty store manager; a strange bunch of little old people from the neighborhood who meet at the store once a week, but never read books, called the Granny Oakleys Book Club; and Aunt Verline, who fancies herself an Iron Chef when in reality you need a cast iron stomach to partake of her culinary disasters. And with a group like this you should never ask, "What else can go wrong?" A lot! Sloane begins to receive cyber threats. While Sloane uses her computer forensic skills to uncover the source of the threats, it is discovered someone is out to kill her. Can her life get more crazy? COOKING THE BOOKS is the first book in Ms. Calhoun's Sloan Templeton Mystery series. Ms. Calhoun is the queen of sarcastic, snappy, snarky writing, I think, and some of the wording indicated one thing but was in fact quite another so that made for interesting reading--but it also served to keep the reader distant. The characters were as wacky as promised. Over-the-top so. There were a lot of different subplots so that it got confusing at times and some of them didn't seem to get resolved. The main topic was sometimes graphic at times, but well presented. Readers of cozy mysteries might love COOKING THE BOOKS. A fun, quirky book with promise.