Tempest in a Teapot: 09/29/20

Tempest in a Teapot by Amanda Cooper is the start of the three book Teapot Collector mystery series. Amanda Cooper is a pseudonym for Canadian author, Victoria Hamilton.

Sophie Taylor has moved to Gracious Grove, a small, dry town in the Finger Lakes area of Upstate New York. She will be working in her Aunt Rosie's Victorian Teahouse. She had run her own restaurant in New York, but it had failed after three years. Now she needs a change of pace.

Typically in a cozy mystery, especially in the first volume, the murder takes place in the location that will be the feature of the series. For this series, one would expect the murder to take place in Aunt Rosie's shop. Instead, it happens across the street at a rival tea shop.

From that choice onwards the pacing seems off. A lot of time is wasted on repeating the same ideas and theories with little no further forward progress.

In fact, early on, a character calls the police to finger someone. While she's not entirely correct, she's close enough that if police and the main character had explored that lead, the book would have been half the length.

Cooper uses multiple points of view just as Hamilton does in the Constable Molly Smith series. While it makes sense when the main character is a police officer, where the investigation is done by multiple people, it doesn't here. The book opens with Sophie Taylor, with a very strong point of view. One would expect that POV.

The second book is Shadow of a Spout (2015).

Three stars

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