Today it is my pleasure to welcome author Ana T. Drew and her cozy mystery novel, The Murderous Macaron.
Author’s description
Julie has her freedom, a dream job as a pastry chef, and a corpse growing cold on her floor…
Welcome to Beldoc, a small town in the heart of Provence, imbued with lavender and fresh baked bread! You can idle around, or you can puzzle out a murder mystery.
When a man dies on her watch in her pâtisserie, newly divorced chef Julie Cavallo is dismayed. It isn’t that she’s a suspect. The local gendarmerie captain signs off the death as a natural event. A heart attack. But for a reason she won’t discuss, Julie suspects Maurice Sauve was poisoned. What’s a girl to do? She’ll ignore the risk and seek justice for Maurice on her own!
Well, not quite on her own. Julie’s eccentric grandmother, her snarky sister and her geeky sous chef are keen to help. The team’s amateurism is a challenge. But there’s also the pesky matter of no evidence, no clues, and soon, no body. The murder—if it was a murder—was planned and executed flawlessly.
Can a small-town baker solve the perfect crime?
“The Murderous Macaron” is a twisty whodunnit mystery perfect for fans of Janet Evanovich, Alexander McCall Smith, Jana DeLeon, and Lilian Jackson Braun.
My Review
The Murderous Macaron is a fun read, sure to please fans of cozy mysteries and lovers of well-meaning and sometimes bumbling amateur sleuths. (I do happen to be one such fan.) Julie’s bakery is the focal point of this gentle who-done-it, and there is just enough of France woven into the story to appeal to lovers of travel as well.
What I liked best: Simply put, this is an enjoyable book. I appreciate that it was an easy read, well paced and well written. The somewhat complex solutions to the case were believable yet not obvious, providing a satisfying ending.
My favorite thing was Drew’s stellar cast of secondary characters. Grandma is great. I do love feisty old women and she delivers. Sister Flo, the artist, is equally fun, and I could have done with more of the geeky sous chef as well. I’m not a huge dog fan, but I even enjoyed Lady, the sleuth dog who joins the team.
What I liked least: There is a fascinating backstory here, dribbled out in small pieces and never fully dealt with. It is difficult to reconcile the light tone of the novel with an unexplained traumatic family death, an estranged twin with unusual powers, and Julie’s issues with both of the above. Yet, it all comes up often enough to make it hard to ignore.
The reader wants answers. I suppose the author intends to weave more explanations into future novels, but as regarded these issues, I felt cheated at the end. Plus, the only part receiving a real explanation (why Julie doesn’t like her twin) is just odd.
However, Drew’s story was charming enough for me to put that frustration aside, along with my current irritation with the gluten-free world, brought on by a husband who’s decided to go gluten free for no real reason, forcing me to abandon half of my favorite recipes. That’s hardly Ana T. Drew’ fault, and I resolved early on not to hold Julie’s gluten-free bakery against her.
So, I’d be happy to read more books in this series and I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a good mystery novel.
About the Author
Ana T. Drew is the evil mastermind behind the recent series of murders in the fictional French town of Beldoc. When she is not writing cozy mysteries or doing mom-and-wife things, she can be found watching “The Rookie” to help her get over “Castle”. She lives in Paris but her heart is in Provence.
Find the Author at
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/author/ana-drew
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AnaDrewAuthor
Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/ana-t-drew
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/anadrew
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/authoranadrew
Visit the author’s website ana-drew.com for a free cookbook and a game!
Buy The Murderous Macaron on Amazon.
Yes, there is a giveaway
Ana T. Drew will be awarding a $20 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.
This post is part of a tour sponsored by Goddess Fish. Check out all the other tour stops. If you drop by each of these and comment, you will greatly increase your chances of winning.
My Favorite Excerpt
I sit down across a round table from the gendarme, Capitaine Adinian, and begin my sad tale of yesterday’s macaron-making workshop that didn’t go as planned.
He listens, barely taking any notes.
When I get to the part where I asked my students to mix the ingredients I’d prepared for them, Capitaine Adinian leans forward. “Who prepared and laid out the ingredients?”
“I did.”
“When?”
“Shortly before the class began.”
“Did you leave the shop, even for a brief time, after you had everything ready for the class?” he asks.
“No.”
He scribbles something in his little notebook. “Please continue.”
“Most participants struggled to get their batter to stiffen,” I say. “Some gave up, claiming it was impossible without an electric mixer.”
“Did Maurice Sauve give up?”
“Quite the contrary. He whisked unrelentingly, switching hands but never pausing. He was the first to complete the task.”
Capitaine Adinian writes that down.
“I gave him one of these.” I show Adinian the remaining badges that Flo had made for the workshop.
“Great Baking Potential,” he reads aloud.
“Then I went around with his bowl and had everyone admire the perfect consistency of the batter.”
“Did anything stand out or seem unusual at that point?”
I gaze up at the ceiling, picturing the scene of me praising Maurice Sauve’s firm, satiny batter, students giving him their thumbs-up, and him smiling, visibly stoked. But he isn’t just smiling, he’s also… Panic squeezing my throat, I zero in on his face. He’s panting.
Oh. My. God.
I clap my hand over my mouth. “What if he’d whisked too hard? What if that exertion caused his heart attack?”
“An intense workout, especially at freezing temperatures, can trigger a heart attack,” Adinian says.
“He whisked intensely.”
“Madame Cavallo, I’ve never heard of anyone whisking themselves to an early grave.”
The world of science fiction has changed. When my father introduced me to his favorite books decades ago, there was not a female author to be found. Not long after, I discovered Ursula Le Guin, Kate Wilhelm and Vonda McIntyre on my own. So, women could write this stuff. Well then, that was what I was going to do someday, because I ‘d already been told my first career choice of becoming an astronaut was “not realistic.”
Maybe it’s this simple. Most of the best SFF last year was written by women, and that’s that.
This is our last day of rest before the final push home, and we spend it visiting and relaxing. About a year ago I helped with the landscaping here, and I’m please to see how much of it has survived a year in the Texas heat.
We’re talking the kind of shower that makes you feel like you are driving through a car wash; one that is so loud you can’t talk or listen to music, and is so intense that you can barely see the tail lights of the vehicle ahead of you. We change drivers often because it’s exhausting at best and downright dangerous at worst. As we near Fort Worth, we start to run into the inevitable weather-related traffic accidents, and from then on we find ourselves in stop and go traffic in a downpour until we reach our destination.
You’d think it’s be pretty easy to wake up, throw all your shit in the car, and go, but it turns out is isn’t.
It takes me about three hours to do what I allowed 30 minutes for, and that’s only because I get a fair amount of help. My noon-time good-byes are rushed and sweaty, perhaps not a fitting climax to this amazing experience, but then again, exactly what about this experience has been fitting?
There was the deep playa at night, my happy place if ever I’ve had one. There was the humor and playfulness. The kindness that was the norm, not the exception.
I never visited the MOOP MAP place (MOOP being matter out of place, often referred to as trash in the default world), but it’s location pointed me home to camp each night when I was done exploring. Thank you MOOP MAP.
I once called Colorado home, but over the years I’d forgotten its breathtaking beauty. Day 10 was spent driving 350 miles from Kittredge CO to Moab Utah through some of the most spectacular scenery on earth. I don’t say that lightly. I’ve been to the Andes and the Alps, seen Mt Kilimanjaro and the Atlas mountain. All gorgeous, but our very own Colorado is right up there with them.
I finished off the day by following the suggestion of my Airbnb hosts and veering off of I70 after the Utah border to take state highway 128. Talk about spectacular. Then I headed in Arches National Park to top off of a day of gasping out loud at what I was seeing.
This is ridiculous, I thought. I already travel with a towel (thank you Doug Adams), a pocketknife and a hand powered flashlight. Why the hell don’t I keep an onion in my car? I mean, they last forever, and one little onion would have made a huge improvement in my meal.
The day started out rainy, with the intermixed heavy showers that make any travel challenging. The mysterious highway 86 out of Limon turned out to really exist, which was good news, and to even be a decent two-lane road through wide open plains. It had almost no traffic, which was great. It also had almost no homes and absolutely no towns and went on for at least thirty miles more than I had guessed. This unexpected lack of civilization, lasting for an indeterminate length of time, came up against two problems: my increasingly full bladder and my emptying gas tank.
The day ended well. I’m in my fourth Airbnb of the trip, and every one has been fine. This one has a view of the canyon.
After a nice dinner out, I’ve retired to my room to relax with a glass of wine and to share my thoughts. Today’s rule of the road? When all else fails, it’s okay to turn to another human for help. And today’s song? One I saw performed live, thanks to the same helpful daughter. It was one of my most amazing concert experiences, and I’ve had a few of them. Cheers, and enjoy!
I was flying.
I keep on flying in my dreams.
Once I got my first real job, it came with this new thing called discretionary income. I signed up for flying lessons. I did fake emergency landings in fields and got okayed to fly solo. Sunday mornings, I’d drive to the little airport and spend my drinking money on an hour of airplane rental instead.
Then I got older. I had babies. They cried at changing cabin pressure when it made their little ears fill with pain and vacationing by car was better. I dreamt about flying, but not as often. When the dreams came, I was alone, moving silently through the air over wilderness. Maybe it was because I traveled a lot for my job, through busy airports on crowded flights, in seats that kept getting smaller. Claustrophobia kicked in. I decided conference calls worked fine.
I didn’t fly often.
These days I write. When a sentence comes out perfect, I suck in my breath knowing it’s the best it can be. The sensation feels like flying.
These days, she travels for her work, sometimes, and that is understandable. Other times, she is on her way to help aging parents, or to meet friends or family, and of course that makes sense. But what about the woman on a journey, a whole journey, by herself, simply for the sake of enjoying herself? At best, it seems odd to many.
There were a lot of considerations. I wasn’t traveling alone, but with my daughter, and I didn’t want the role of tour guide. I was concerned about our mutual safety, our poor grasp of Spanish, and the fairly daunting logistics of getting from Lima to Cuzco, dealing with a 12,000 elevation change, then navigating buses and trains through the Sacred Valley, and securing two of the carefully controlled tickets into Machu Picchu and then doing it all again in reverse to get home. I knew I could manage it, but it sounded more like work than fun.
We had a great time in Peru, and the tour thing worked out quite well as this was one destination where having some help was wise. I took away more from this trip than happy memories and fine photos, however. I took away an idea.
Seven Troublesome Sisters 