How to Bake a Murder

Take a good, long look at the cover of this book. View the adorable, little doggo and the sweet-looking grandma. Absorb the fun, pastel colours and generally nice aesthetic of a bakery. Pay attention to the fact this claims to be a cozy mystery.

Are you done? Great. Now take everything you think you know from this book's cover and toss it aside, because you - like my past self - are entirely wrong. Whatever the visuals conjure in your mind is almost certainly not what you'll get from this book. (Unless it's just my brain that's broken... But y'know what? This is my review, so we're running on the assumption that I'm not an inept outlier.)

This book isn't what I wanted. I don't feel like there's anything “cozy” about a book which features a battered woman begging someone to save her, the main character breaking down in tears every other chapter, a gun-wielding psychopath taking hostages, a series of juvenile temper tantrums from a grown woman, and a funeral where people make disrespectful jokes about the dead guy. Many times, this felt more like a dark comedy or a mediocre ‘normal' mystery, not something meant to be lighthearted and, y'know, cozy.

Am I just confused on what a “cozy mystery” is supposed to be? I don't know, but for me the genre conjures mental images of petty small town drama and jovial women wandering town playing sleuth in low-stakes scenarios while clues are laid out for the readers. It doesn't make me expect nonsensical relationship drama and high levels of violence beyond the initial murder... and especially not infuriatingly bad parenting skills. Or family drama in general.

Which, okay, I'll admit the family drama is a huge downer for me. I have to be in the right mindset to read about bad parenting and not come out the other end wanting to manifest fictional people into reality just so I can punt them across a football field. When one of the people partaking in bad parenting is supposed to be an adorable, old lady protagonist? Well, it makes me feel conflicted in ways I don't enjoy.

Every time I found myself trying to justify Cookie's mistakes with “her heart's in the right place,” she'd turn around and make a bigger blunder, and the narrative almost always seemed to think what she was doing was fine. She wasn't abusive, but she did some cruel things like threatening to kick out her granddaughter for trying to sneak out (lol what) even though she knew the girl was feeling unwanted and unloved after being sent away by a mom who doesn't care about her enough to make sure she gets along with her stepdad before marrying the man and thinks evicting her child for the summer is the solution to the problem. She also had some backward views, such as thinking her granddaughter being forced to wash her own dishes when she'd already fallen asleep at the table after a long day doing unpaid bakery labour was making sure the girl “showed respect and pulled her own weight.” Talk about an ‘okay, boomer' moment! You'd think common human compassion would make her grab the girl's dishes too and let her go right to bed, maybe even thank her for all that unpaid assistance at work and apologize for having also dragged her to a stranger's funeral she didn't wish to attend earlier the same day. But nope! If she doesn't wash her own dishes, she isn't “pulling her weight”!