Book Review: Death of a Tom Turkey (Hayley Powell Food and Cocktails Mystery, #18) by Lee Hollis

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Death of a Tom Turkey (Hayley Powell Food and Cocktails Mystery, #18)  by Lee Hollis  opens with Tom Farley and his neighbors in a snit because he's the last holdout to sell his house to a property developer who wants to build a resort. When Tom is shot at a pre-Thanksgiving community gathering and hospitalized, Hayley Powell puts her amateur sleuthing skills to good use. Thank you to NetGalley and Kensington Publishers for providing me with an Advanced Readers Copy (ARC) of this cozy mystery. I received a copy of this book for free in exchange of my honest opinion and review of the story. I loved the fact that this latest installment of the Hayley Powell Food and Cocktails Mystery  series had a theme around the Thanksgiving holiday and included live turkeys in the plot. It was good to visit some familiar characters. Since this is the eighteenth installment in the series, Lee Hollis didn't go into much detail of the background of those reoccurring characters; however, she...
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Book Review: Three Bedrooms, Two Baths, One Very Dead Corpse (Amanda Thorne Mysteries, #1) by David James

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Three Bedrooms, Two Baths, One Very Dead Corpse (Amanda Thorne Mysteries, #1) by  David James takes place in Palm Springs, California. Realtor Amanda Thorne is having the worst morning. Her car won't start, so she decides to ride her bike to her showing, only to crash into a cactus. Her day gets worse when she finally arrives at her listing to find a dead body in the house.

This book, although entertaining enough, fell a bit flat for me. I liked the book well enough to continue reading to find out what would happen. However, there were quite a few things that bothered me.
 
Amanda Thorne's responses to certain situations were a bit of a stretch in believability as she was overly dramatic and emotional. I feel like the main character shouldn't have been written from a woman's perspective. On top of that, the amount of cursing in Three Bedrooms, Two Baths, One Very Dead Corpse was over the top, which typically doesn't bother me. However, I felt like it could have been done better. I didn't care for the way the Lithuanian grandmother was written or the obvious disdain for people who were into new age practices.
 
Despite my complaints, I will give David James another chance and read the next book in the series. I gave Three Bedrooms, Two Baths, One Very Dead Corpse (Amanda Thorne Mysteries, #1) 2.5 stars out of 5 stars but rounded it up to 3 stars on Goodreads.com. If you enjoyed this book, I recommend The Bounty (Fox and O'Hare, #7) by Janet Evanovich and Steve Hamilton.


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