Digging Up Trouble: 09/23/22

Digging Up Trouble by Kitt Crowe and Tina Wolstencroft (narrator) (2021) is the start of the Sweet Fiction mystery series. Set in Confection, Oregon, a fictional town near Bend, it's about a bookshop owner and her dog who end up solving a pair of murders with the help of the book club.

Lexi has a modest home with a modest garden, in a town that prides itself on its well maintained, prize winning gardens. Her border collie mix, Cookie, has become a bit of a pariah for her love of digging. Now any unexpected hole or overturned earth in a garden is blamed on her. It is during Lexi's quest to prove her dog's innocence that she ends up in the middle of a murder mystery.

For a town that is so flower and vegetable obsessed, I found the sweets themed streets and the town's name, Confection, a bit twee. It wasn't enough of a distraction to stop reading. I'm hoping later books will explain the town's naming scheme. At least it's memorable among all the other fictional small towns I visit in these cozy mysteries.

The mysteries themselves were a nice blend of puzzles. There is a rumored buried treasure. There's a missing sibling. There's a dead curmudgeon who was apparently a sweetheart to a select few. With the possibility of treasure and the gardening shenanigans, the book reads like a blending of Read and Gone by Allison Brook (2018) and A Curious Incident by Vicki Delany (2021).

The second book is A Poisonous Page (2022).

Four stars

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