The Uninvited Corpse: 05/06/25

The Uninvited Corpse by Debra Sennefelder and Callie Beaulieu (Narrator) (2018) is the start of the Food Blogger mystery series. Hope Early is a divorcee and a food blogger. For reasons that aren't clear to me, she's invited to a garden tour. While there the "reviled" real estate agent Peaches McCoy is murdered and Hope happens to find her body.

Character introductions and scene building, especially in the first book in a series is a balancing act. Too much can overwhelm or bore the reader. Too little can leave the reader confused. In a mystery series, these opening scenes help lay out clues and potential red herrings. They are there to establish the nature of the puzzle that the reader alongside the main character will be asked to solve.

Some authors like to make the murder victim an obvious bad guy — someone who is a constant thorn in the side of the main character and might even be a threat to that character's larger circle of friends or acquaintances. That sort of victim is easier to stomach when they end up dead.

The really obvious murder victim, though, has become a cliché and I think Sennefelder was trying to avoid that narrative trap. We are told throughout the book about Peaches's ruthlessness as a real estate agent but other than a few brief scenes before her death we don't get much first hand experience.

The thing that bothered me the most was Hope's involvement in the garden tour. It's not something directly related to her food blog. She was helping a friend, but as this is the first book that friendship isn't well established. That friend is just one more name in a cast of potential murderers.

Finally there was the location of the murder: a woman's home during a tour. Sure, it was a tour, but it was a short and exclusive list of invitees, with the murder victim being the one gate crasher. To me, at least, the solution to the murder wasn't that difficult and unfortunately nor was it that satisfying.

The next book in the series is The Hidden Corpse (2019).

Three stars

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