Review: The Key Lime Crime

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I love Lucy Burdette’s  Key West Food Critic mystery series. After all, what’s not to love! With cats, a tropical setting, and mouth-watering food (with some recipes included), this series has all the ingredients for purrfect escapist reading. And who doesn’t need to escape from reality these days!

Last Wednesday, Lucy introduced you to T-Bone, the newest feline character in the series, joining the two cats and the dog who already live on a houseboat with main character Hailey Snow and her octogenarian friend Gloria.

In The Key Lime Crime, Hailey investigates the murder of a baker who is found dead after an altercation at a baking competition.

From the publisher:

When a fierce rivalry between key lime pie bakers leads to a pastry chef’s murder, food critic Hayley Snow is fit to be pied.

During the week between Christmas and New Year’s, the year-round population of Key West, Florida, faces a tsunami of tourists and snowbirds. It doesn’t help that outrageously wealthy key lime pie aficionado David Sloan has persuaded the city to host his pie-baking contest. Every pie purveyor on the island is out to win the coveted Key Lime Key to the City and Key Zest food critic Hayley Snow is on the scene to report it.

Meanwhile, Hayley’s home life is turning more tart than sweet. Hayley’s new hubby, police detective Nathan Bransford, announces that her intimidating mother-in-law is bearing down on the island for a surprise visit. Hayley offers to escort Nathan’s crusty mom on the iconic Conch Train Tour of the island’s holiday lights, but it becomes a recipe for disaster when they find a corpse among the glittering palm trees and fantastic flamingos. The victim–Au Citron Vert’s controversial new pastry chef–was a frontrunner in Sloan’s contest.

It’s bad enough that Hayley’s too-curious mother-in-law is cooking up trouble. Now, the murderer is out to take a slice out of Hayley. Can she handle the heat of a killer’s kitchen?

I loved visiting beautiful Key West and catching up with Hailey and her friends again. Lucy Burdette does a wonderful job with developing her quirky and likeable characters from one book to the next. The vivid descriptions of the tropical island setting make you feel like you are there. I visited Key West once in the 1980’s and fell in love with the island, but haven’t been back since then. Every time I read a book in this series, I long for another chance to visit.

The Key Lime Crime can be read as a stand alone, but why not treat yourself to the whole series? The setting, the fast moving plot, the guilt-free pleasure of reading about amazing food, and, of course, the cats, make this one of my favorite mystery series.

The Key Lime Crime is available from Amazon.

*The Conscious Cat is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites. This means that if you decide to purchase through any of our links, we get a small commission. We only spread the word about products and services we’ve either used or would use ourselves. I received this book from the publisher. Receiving the complimentary copy did not influence my review.

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