I was shelving returns in the mystery section last Tuesday — the branch was empty, that weird late-afternoon quiet where the fluorescent lights seem louder than they should be — and I had about three hours left on this one. Cozy mystery in a library. I'm aware of the cliché. But here's the thing: I wasn't expecting Dying for Chocolate to actually hook me the way it did, because culinary cozies and I have a complicated history. They're usually the polar opposite of my wheelhouse. But Barbara Rosenblat's Goldy Bear kept pulling me back in like a neighbor who won't stop talking at a block party — and you don't actually want her to stop.
A Caterer With More Bite Than the Hallmark Version
So I'd seen the Hallmark adaptation ages ago, barely remembered it, and honestly? The book version of Goldy is a completely different animal. She's combative. She's sharp-tongued. She's juggling an abusive ex, a shaky catering business she's relocated to a country club she clearly finds ridiculous, and a love triangle between a psychiatrist and a cop that never feels forced. When Philip Miller drives his BMW into a bus — and Goldy immediately decides this wasn't an accident — you believe her instinct because Davidson has already established that this woman reads people the way she reads recipes. With precision and a little too much confidence.
The mystery itself is solid mid-tier cozy. Not revolutionary, but the Colorado setting gives it a specific flavor (pun reluctantly intended), and the way Goldy's catering gigs double as her investigation method — she's literally serving hors d'oeuvres to suspects — is genuinely clever plotting. There's a scene where she trips over a corpse that Rosenblat delivers at a heart-pounding clip, and it honestly caught me off guard. I was expecting scones and gossip. I got a body and real dread. Not Hill House dread, obviously. But for a cozy? I felt something.
Compared to something like Joanne Fluke's Hannah Swensen books, which I've also listened to, Davidson writes a protagonist with actual edges. I ran into the same problem with the Fluke-adjacent end of the spectrum when I reviewed Silent Woman — a cozy that keeps its protagonist so relentlessly likable she never feels like a person you'd actually believe in. Goldy isn't just quirky and lovable — she's sometimes wrong, sometimes reckless, and the book doesn't smooth those rough patches out. That's the difference between a cozy mystery character and a cozy mystery person.
Barbara Rosenblat: Brilliant, But Let's Talk About the Mouth Sounds
Okay. Here's where this gets complicated. Rosenblat is genuinely good. Her Goldy has this specific Colorado-transplant energy — not quite a drawl, not quite flat, but grounded and warm with an intelligence that crackles through the wit. She differentiates characters well — the cops sound different from the country club set, the ex-husband has this oily quality that made my skin crawl in exactly the right way. When the suspense kicks in, she shifts tempo like someone who understands pacing isn't just speed — it's tension control.
But.
The mouth noises. I have to be honest because some of you will hear them immediately and some of you won't notice at all, and you deserve to know which camp you'll fall into before spending a credit. There's swallowing between sentences. Lip sounds. Little wet clicks. If you're listening on earbuds in a quiet room — which I was — they're present. Not constant, but frequent enough that once you hear them, your brain starts listening for them. I've read reviews from people who abandoned the audiobook entirely over this, and I get it. I didn't — Rosenblat's performance was engaging enough that I pushed through — but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a factor.
For context: I listen to horror narrators who whisper and rasp and do terrible things with their vocal cords, and production quality matters to me. This feels like a recording that could've used one more pass through noise reduction. The performance is a 4. The audio quality brings it down.
Who Gets a Seat at Goldy's Table
If you love culinary cozies, this is one of the genre's cornerstones for a reason. Davidson respects the form while giving it real stakes. If you're coming from thriller or horror and want something lighter but not soft, Goldy's got enough spine to keep you interested.
If you're sensitive to mouth sounds in audio? Test a sample first. Seriously. This is a "know thyself" situation.
At 9 and a half hours, it's a solid weekend listen — good for driving, good for cooking (thematically appropriate), maybe not ideal for falling asleep to because Rosenblat's energy runs pretty hot.
Shirley (My Cat) Would Eat the Evidence
I'm not converting to the cozy mystery life permanently. But Dying for Chocolate reminded me that good genre fiction — any genre — comes down to a protagonist you'd actually want to spend time with and a narrator who commits to making that person real. Rosenblat commits. That's rare. The audio quirks are real, but so is the performance underneath them. My podcast listeners are going to raise an eyebrow at me reviewing a cozy, but good craft is good craft, and I'll defend Goldy Bear's right to investigate a murder over canapés any day of the week.
