Book Review: Dying for Chocolate

Book: Dying for Chocolate by Diane Mott Davidson

Rating: 1 star

Review:

I thought Dying for Chocolate wasn't very good. A majority of the story focused more on describing what food the main character Goldy Bear was preparing instead of solving the mystery. I mean there were pages and pages of nothing but of her cooking and maybe with her interacting with her son and a few others. However, it was mainly about the food.

There wasn't much of a plot either and it wasn't until nearly the last 100 pages when Goldy started to try solving the mystery. And even then she didn't seem that interested in it. There really wasn't a lot of clues to solving the mystery and I thought the revelation at the end felt too stagey or like a bad soap opera.

The story was about caterer Goldy Bear and her son Arch, as they temporarily moved to a more secured residence after feeling threatened by her abusive ex-husband. My thing is, if he was so abusive why wasn't he locked up and why was he still allowed unsupervised time with their son? Anyway, Goldy and her son moved so that she could be the live-in chef to a wealthy older couple whose home is a bit like a fortress with all the security alarms.

The mystery centered on the death of psychologist Philip Miller who died in a car accident. Thinking the accident seemed strange, Goldy who was a witness (and after pages of doing nothing but cooking and eating various meals) starts to investigate the possible cause of Philip's accident.

There were quite a lot of characters in this with a majority of them being uninteresting. I thought police investigator Tom Schulz was interesting. Unlike, main character Goldy, who was lackluster and a pushover, she let her ex-husband continue to treat her poorly as well as the two teens in the book: the beauty pageant queen Sissy and the other live-in helper Julian.

This was a really fast paced read but that's about it. The story wasn't interesting and neither were most of the characters. There were a lot of pages of nothing happening. I'm glad I only paid around 12 cents for this because I would have been even more disappointed if I had paid the full price for it. If I ever read anymore books from this series, I will check them out from the library.