Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder (Hannah Swensen, #1)
by Joanne Fluke (Goodreads Author)

3.5 out of 5 stars

Hannah is the owner of the Cookie Jar bakery. When the delivery guy is late, she goes out to the alley and finds his body. Her brother-in-law is the police detective on the case, and he asks for Hannah’s help. She hears all the gossip at the bakery and their small town neighbors might be more willing to talk to her than to a police officer. Hannah begins to poke around, discovering secrets and mysteries, but only one clue will eventually lead to the killer.

This was such a fun mystery! I loved that there are several cookie recipes included, and I even tried one of them! I baked the Chocolate Chip Crunchies with corn flakes in the cookie batter, and they were delicious. My whole family loved them!

I got a little bogged down in all the lengthy descriptions of food though. I ended up skimming paragraphs and paragraphs of food descriptions. Maybe if you are a foodie/gourmet then you would enjoy it. It slowed down the plot though.

Even aside from the long descriptions, the plot dragged a bit slow. If you want a restful sort of mystery, then this would be great. But I felt like the whole story could have been condensed a little.

I lost track of all the myriad of small town neighbors. I remembered about twelve of the main group of characters, and after that I couldn’t remember who they all were or what their names were. There are just too many characters!

The writing style is really good, and the pacing flows along nicely. The mystery itself has lots of twists and turns and revelations. I had no idea until the very end who the killer could be!

There is one really nasty description of sexual harassment that absolutely horrified me, and there is a character who is beat up from domestic abuse, but other than that it’s a clean book with no profanity or graphic violence.