All-Butter ShortDead by H.Y. Hanna
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
💜💜💜💜 I enjoyed this prequel to the Oxford Tearoom Mysteries series. It’s a novella that takes us back to how Gemma Rose started up her tearoom in Oxford. We first meet some of the recurring characters that appear in the series including Gemma’s best friend Cassie, her baker, Fletcher, the old biddies, and mischievous cat, Muesli. Since I consider myself an Anglophile, the setting was very much to my liking, and I appreciated envisioning Oxford and the Cotswolds. There was a murder mystery that I thought I’d solved which involved Gemma and a mysterious woman she met on the flight from Australia to England, but I was wrong. The author did a nice job with the whodunnit, and I was surprised by the identity of the true culprit. Since the book is quite short, being a novella, there isn’t a whole lot of development, but it’s just right as a lead-in to the books that follow. I’m looking forward to reading the others in the series. If you love cozy mysteries, you’ll enjoy All-Butter ShortDead.
Cozynookbks 