Lost and Fondue: 10/24/18

Lost and Fondue by Avery Aames is the second of the Cheese Shop mystery series. Charlotte Bessette is catering an event at a long abandoned winery. The building is being transformed into an art school and gallery but people are on edge on rumors of buried treasure. Then one of the promising artists ends up dead and a friend of Charlotte's is fingered for the crime!

Mostly with this book I recall the setting. A lot of work (or perhaps borrowing of local knowledge) went into creating a believable back story for this building and the family who owned it. There is lore tied up with the winery that involves a possible murder suicide and a person dying in an insane asylum.

I happened to be reading this book while I was in the middle of a large family genealogy project. There were some striking parallels to this fictional family and my own. Maybe being in the right mind set or at least intimately familiar with similar tales made connecting the historical dots to the present day mystery dots an easy task.

Although I knew early on what was going on I still had fun reading the book. I felt the characters and setting were better established than in the first book. The emphasis was on the mystery and not on the cheese or on setting up personal non-mystery-related drama.

The third book in the series is Clobbered by Camembert. I'll try to keep my Chat Noir jokes to a minimum when I review it.

Four stars

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