"Ernie Kusak found sprawled on the floor... head bashed in... next to a box of cookies."
That's how this kicks off. My wife, Linda, put this on during our drive down to San Antonio for the holidays. She knows my rule: the driver picks the audio. But she also knows I have a soft spot for anything involving a crime scene, even if the primary evidence is baked goods. So, I compromised.
I usually deal with threats involving IEDs or corporate espionage. Here, we're dealing with a killer who leaves gingerbread crumbs as a calling card. It's absurd. But—and don't tell the guys at the firm I said this—it actually works for a long drive when you don't want to think too hard.
THE SQUAD IN THE BOOTH
Here's the situation. This isn't one long novel; it's three novellas packaged together. That means three different authors and, crucially, three different narrators.
Suzanne Toren handles the first section, the Joanne Fluke story. I've heard Toren before—she's a pro. She voices Hannah Swensen with this sharp, no-nonsense tone that reminds me of a Katherine Hepburn type. She commands the room. Honestly, if she were briefing my team, they'd listen. She makes the "cozy" dialogue sound less fluffy and more like an interrogation.
Then you switch gears to Danielle Ferland and Andrea Gallo for the other stories. It's jarring. Like swapping out your comms gear in the middle of an operation. They aren't bad—Gallo has a decent rhythm—but Toren set a high bar right out of the gate. If you're the type who needs consistency to stay immersed, this might bug you. It took me a solid twenty minutes to adjust to the new voices each time the story switched.
TACTICAL BREAKDOWN OF THE STORIES
The structure is a bit of a mixed bag.
First up is Fluke's Gingerbread Cookie Murder. It's the strongest of the three. You get a body, a list of suspects longer than a supply chain manifest, and some actual deductive work. It felt like a proper investigation, just with more frosting.
Then we get into Laura Levine's story about a playboy doctor falling off a stage. This one... look, it's slapstick. Linda was laughing; I was rolling my eyes. It's more comedy than thriller. The victim "accidentally" falls to his death? I've seen accidental deaths; they're rarely this convenient. For actual creepy deaths that feel deliberate, Six Creepy Stories by Edgar Allan Poe delivers the real thing—no slapstick required.
Leslie Meier's closer, Gingerbread Cookies and Gunshots, tries to raise the stakes with a missing kid. It's darker than the middle story, which I appreciated. But because these are novellas, everything wraps up way too fast. In my line of work, investigations take months. Here, they catch the bad guy before the cookies cool down. It feels rushed. You don't get that slow-burn tension I look for.
WHO SHOULD LISTEN (AND WHO SHOULD SKIP)
If you want gritty realism or consistent narration, stay far away. But if you want something light for a holiday road trip—and you can handle the narrator roulette—this does the job.
SITREP
Is this going to replace my usual diet of spy thrillers and military history? Negative. But for a holiday road trip with the spouse? It did the job.
Ranger (my Shepherd) slept through the entire thing in the back seat, waking up only when Toren did a particularly loud exclamation.
The coffee might be better in Austin, but the cookies in this book sounded pretty damn good.
