Book Review: A Story to Kill by Lynn Cahoon

A Story to Kill (Cat Latimer Mystery 1) by Lynn Cahoon
My rating: 🌟🌟 (2 stars)
Publisher: Kensington


When the series title character of a cozy spends the majority of her time being served food, napping and having teenage angst with her former high school beau, there's a problem. When a dead body is found in the main character's writer's retreat B&B and that main character doesn't seem terribly interested in finding out what's happened for many chapters or worried that one of her guests is a murderer, you've got a crisis as mystery tellings go.



This never quite got off the ground for me and was just okay. I liked the setting, some of the main characters (Shauna and Uncle Pete) and the majority of the secondary players in for the retreat. Cat is going to take longer to like or other things in her personality to be the focus. I didn't care about Seth or her angst over him as it felt as though it was still firmly cemented in high school all the way down to Cat's highschool rival. Seth seemed like a "boyfriend blank" which I've run across in other cozies. Those guys never have actual personalities but they're around to give the heroine a love interest seemingly for the sake of it. None of it added anything good to the story for this reader. Hopefully, there'll be less of this and more of a mystery in the subsequent books (because I already own at least four of them; damn those great book blurbs!). So much focus diverted from the actual mystery at hand made for a very slow pace and when all was revealed, it felt unnecessarily so.

I'll read the next but not immediately. I don't know that I'd recommend this but it's a bit difficult to tell about a cozy series overall from a first book. Sometimes they need to get the foibles worked out and turn out quite good. So, soft recommend with that in mind. 


Summary:  Former English professor Cat Latimer is back in Colorado, hosting writers’ retreats in the big blue Victorian she’s inherited, much to her surprise, from none other than her carousing ex-husband! Now it’s an authors’ getaway—but Cat won’t let anyone get away with murder…The bed-and-breakfast is open for business, and bestselling author Tom Cook is among its first guests. Cat doesn’t know why he came all the way from New York, but she’s glad to have him among the quirkier—and far less famous—attendees.

Cat’s high school sweetheart Seth, who’s fixing up the weathered home, brings on mixed emotions for Cat…some of them a little overpowering. But it’s her uncle, the local police chief, whom she’ll call for help when there’s a surprise ending for Tom Cook in his cozy guest room. Will a killer have the last word on the new life Cat has barely begun?

Cat’s high school sweetheart Seth, who’s fixing up the weathered home, brings on mixed emotions for Cat…some of them a little overpowering. But it’s her uncle, the local police chief, whom she’ll call for help when there’s a surprise ending for Tom Cook in his cozy guest room. Will a killer have the last word on the new life Cat has barely begun?



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