About the Book:
When Savvy Summers first opened Essie's soul food café, she never expected her customer-favorite sweet potato pie to become the center of a murder investigation. But when Grandy Jaspers, the 75-year-old neighborhood womanizer, drops dead at table two, she suddenly has more to worry about than just maintaining Essie's reputation for the finest soul food in the Chicagoland area.
Even as the police deem Grandy’s death an accident, Savvy quickly finds herself―and her beloved café―in the middle of an entire city’s worth of bad press. Desperate to clear her name and keep her business afloat, Savvy and her snooping assistant manager, Penny Lopés, take it upon themselves to find who really killed Grandy.
But with a slimy investor harassing her to sell her name and business, customers avoiding her sweet potato pie like the plague, and her police sergeant ex-husband suddenly back in the picture, will Savvy be able to clear the café’s name and solve Grandy’s murder before it all falls apart?
After all, while Savvy always said her sweet potato pie was to die for, she never meant literally.
My Review:
This
novel is deeply set in the south Chicago culture of the Black
community. The dialogue was hard for me to follow. Savvy is a good
amateur sleuth as she pursues the deaths and tries to keep her
restaurant alive. There are a number of quirky characters, many of
them unlikable. I did not like the sometimes crude and vulgar
language. The book is set in a very different culture than I am used
to in a cozy mystery.
The
plot is a bit different. The police do not think the deaths murder so
Savvy is sort of on her own. It was a little difficult to get engaged
in the story but the second half of the book moved better than the
first half. This novel is just not one I enjoyed but others may.
My
rating: 3/5 stars.
About the Author:
Sandra Jackson-Opoku is the author of the award-winning novel, The River Where Blood is Born and Hot Johnny and the Women Who Loved Him, an Essence Magazine Bestseller in Hardcover Fiction. She also coedited the anthology Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks. Her fiction, nonfiction, and dramatic works are widely published and produced in Adi Magazine, Midnight & Indigo, Aunt Chloe, Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction, New Daughters of Africa, Obsidian, Another Chicago Magazine, storySouth, Lifeline Theatre, the Chicago Humanities Festival, and others. Professional recognition includes a Plentitudes Journal Prize, the Hearst Foundation James Baldwin Fellowship at MacDowell Arts, a National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Fellowship, an American Library Association Black Caucus Award, a City of Chicago Esteemed Artist Award, the Iceland Writers Retreat Alumni Award, a Globe Soup Story Award, the Joan Perry Barnes Fellow in Crime Writing at Storyknife Writers Retreat and a Pushcart Prize nomination. Photo Credit: Michael Brandt.
Minotaur Books, 336 pages.
I received a complimentary egalley of this book from the publisher. Mine is an independent review.
(My
star ratings: 5-I love it, 4-I like it, 3-It's OK, 2-I don't like it,
1-I hate it.)
About the Book:
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