Book Review: A Poisonous Pour (Cece Barton Mystery, #3) by Maddie Day

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A Poisonous Pour (Cece Barton Mystery, #3)  by Maddie Day  opens with the city of Colinas, California celebrating Memorial Day weekend with various activities including a car show and picnic. While co-sponsoring a booth at the car show with local mechanic Josie Jarvin, Cece witnesses one of the attendees, Regan Greene, getting into multiple arguments with others. Aside from that, everything goes well. That is until the next morning when the town finds out that Regan is dead, and it looks like she was murdered. With multiple people having motives, Cece utilizes her amateur sleuthing skills to find out who actually committed the dirty deed. I was approved for and received a digital copy of an Advanced Readers Copy (ARC) of A Poisonous Pour by Maddie Day from NetGalley and Kensington Publishing. A huge thank you goes out to both for providing me a copy for free in exchange for my honest opinion. Maddie Day's Cece Barton series has become one of my favorite cozy mystery series, an...
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Book Review: Tricky Twenty-Two (Stephanie Plum, #22) by Janet Evanovich

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book review tricky twenty two janet evanovich stephanie plum

Tricky Twenty-Two (Stephanie Plum, #22) by Janet Evanovich opens with Stephanie Plum needing to apprehend Ken "Gobbles" Globovic, who is a fraternity called Zeta at Kiltman College, but he has gone into hiding. On top of that, Doug Linken, who has hired Rangeman to protect him, has been killed. What is the connection between Gobbles and Doug, and how is Stephanie going to solve this mystery?

When I first started reading this installment of the Stephanie Plum book series, I thought I was going to end up disliking Tricky Twenty-Two because of what happened in the beginning of the story. However, I ended up absolutely loving it. The story felt a little different the previous stories, and Stephanie didn't seem quite so inept at her job as a bounty hunter. 

Lula cracked me up with her bedazzling and wearing of flea collars . . . you'll have to read the book to find out why she does this and thinks she's going to be the next Martha Stewart. I think this was one of the first times in several books that she doesn't absolutely get on my last nerve, so that was extremely refreshing. There was no Randy Biggs in this story line, so my worries of him being in every book from now on were for naught . . . yay!

And, Stephanie's mom, Ellen, has had some major character development in this installment. I actually am beginning to like her, which is surprising. I think readers will be just as pleasantly delighted as I was by this character growth. 

The ending of Tricky Twenty-Two (Stephanie Plum, #22) has gotten my hopes up that Stephanie will finally settle down, get married, and have kids. However, I'm trying not to get too excited by the ending. All in all, it was a great read, even with it not being as fast paced as previous books in the series, and I gave it five out of five stars.

 


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