An Appetite for Murder

Alrighty, time to buckle in once again and get back in business! This book was a doozy - I thought that I'd pick up a couple of new mysteries to just give myself the opportunity to catch up on some reading and just enjoy bits and pieces of my summer vacation. One of the books that I decided to get my hands on was "An Appetite for Murder" and it was....... interesting. I'm back on my cozy mystery kick and I will be honest - this wasn't the one for me. I was honestly more frustrated than amused by the story. It's the first in the series and it's about Hayley Snow who follows her then boyfriend to Key West and finds out that oops, she's the one that he cheated with. As she tries to work with her new lifestyle, her mom is trying to convince her to come back to New Jersey. When she goes to get back her things, she finds a dead body in her ex's place! Things turn for the worst when she finds out it was her soon to be boss and that Hayley's been framed and charged for the crime! 

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Hayley is jobless, living with her college best friend in a boat house and yet somehow is able to pay for cat food and some really high-end places?? She's also able to pay $20 for a tarot reading every week? 

The cops keep going back to HER specifically for plotting this murder and don't think about hmmm, I don't maybe the receptionist could be a suspect, the other exes, MAYBE EVEN THE JERK BOYFRIEND? Hayley keeps talking about the ex and it honestly frustrated me and if I didn't get 200 pages in already, I would have dropped the book and gone "no, never again." Whenever she's not worried about the murder, she's obsessed with the ex-boyfriend and trying to get back her stuff from her ex. At 200 pages, there was nothing new on the murder, but Hayley had been taken to the police station two times at least. at 259, there was a glimpse that Chad might have been aimed at for the murder, but it was lackluster and didn't really bake anything fun in my brain. It's not needed and she's acting more like a 20-something than the 30-year-old she is. It's a red flag to be talking about him that much and he honestly didn't want anything to do with her half the time. 

I didn't mind the food quotes at the beginning of the chapters, but it got boring after a while. I would have liked to have seen some tips, or something found at the beginning of the chapters to kind of keep people going and interested. Another thing that threw me off was a HUGE lack of recipes. There's only 3 found in the back of the book and it's all having to do with eggplants, cookies and coffee cakes. There's not a single mention of this key lime pie that kills the girlfriend because if something is to die for, THEN GIVE THE RECIPE SO WE MAY TRY IT OURSELVES. As she goes through the different places for food critics, there's no recipe, there's no tips about the food itself. She talks about all of these delicious foods and that's.... it. She doesn't even show us the reviews that she writes fully, only small bits and pieces of it. We as the readers are left out of the loop, somehow being expected to know exactly how to make the food from her reviews.