Fondue or Die: 01/06/25

Fondue or Die by Korina Moss (2024) is the fifth book in the Cheese Shop mystery series. Willa Bauer and crew are working the Dairy Days festival. The woman running the Miss Dairy pageant is murdered. Of course Willa decides to help investigate.

I think I would enjoy this series more if I lived farther away from its setting. I'm just too close to Sonoma to know how far removed this fictional Sonoma is from actual Sonoma.

The festival Willa is participating in is very midwestern. A beauty pageant. Cow theme. Sonoma does actually have a festival: The Artisan Cheese Festival. One of things it has is cheese crawl — something that would be perfect for Curds and Whey to participate in.

Then there's the decision to create another fictional town to be neighbors with. This mystery is set in Lockwood. Except there is a Lockwood, a tiny, economically strapped town in Monterey county. The average reader of this series isn't going to know that but I found comparing the fictional to the real a distraction.

The actual mystery at its nuts and bolts is very similar to Six Stunning Sirens by Lynn Cahoon (2024). It's another pressures of pageantry dredging up old secrets which leads to murder.

Four stars

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