Rest, Relax, Run for Your Life (Ooey Gooey Bakery Mystery)
Cozy Mystery
1st in Series
Independently Published (March 1, 2019)
Paperback: 280 pages

Synopsis

Piper and Samantha are in heaven. Well, close. After winning a contest to raise the most money for human trafficking awareness and prevention, Piper and Sam are rewarded with a long weekend at the O Heavenly Day Spa. When mysterious notes start appearing everywhere, things get uncomfortable. When spa treatments go awry it is starting to get dangerous. A threatening message in Piper’s closet convinces Piper and Sam that they have to find out who is behind all of these disasters before someone gets hurt. Is it Broussard the stuffy concierge? Gladys, the sweet old lady who decided to join them for the weekend? When the smoke alarms go off and the spa erupts into panic, the chaos separates the friends and Piper stumbles into trouble. Will her friends be able to help her in time?

Review

To me, this is a unique cozy that addresses some heavy topics – mainly human trafficking.  I have to give the author major points for coving a heavy issue in this book and I definitely appreciated the information that was shared in relation to a friend of Piper’s from when she was younger.  It was thoughtfully addressed and well explained.  To top it off, it created quite a twist at the end, which I sort of expected but won’t tell you what it is in case you don’t guess!  Then there is the spa, which I inferred was created by a church, and the employees are volunteers but are doing this all for a good cause.  Hence the competition to raise money and Piper and Sam winning the spa weekend by raising the most funds for the charity.

Piper and Sam are each other’s yin and yang when it comes to their friendship and their work environment.  They make a great team in the bakery and many of their desserts sound delicious.  Even the name of the bakery makes the desserts sound sinful.  Piper is a chocolate fanatic and a woman after my own heart. She even brings chocolate to the spa just in case of an emergency.  Definitely someone that I would want to be associated with in case I needed some of that emergency chocolate.

The mystery is a little different – Piper and Sam are trying to find out who is leaving these threatening notes and what do they really mean.  They are threatening but vague and it takes some super sleuthing to get to the bottom of this mystery.  I was surprised at the antagonist as it wasn’t someone I suspected but some clues fell into place when everything was revealed.

As I mentioned, there is a twist at the end, a cliffhanger if you will, that wasn’t surprising but I am curious to see how this plays out in the next book.  I also read in the author’s bio that this is a YA cozy and I don’t think it fits in the YA category.  It is very clean, as all cozies should be, but I am not sure where the YA comes into play since the characters are at least in their 20s.

We enjoyed this book and give it 4 paws up.

About the Author

Katherine Brown is a Texas girl, a lover of books, and a weaver of words. Her first official publication was of two children’s books in 2017, which has now grown into five books of the School is Scary series; however, she likes to think her career as a writer started when she sold her parents newsletters of articles about school and poetry for fifty cents per copy as a pre-teen. Married to a wonderful husband and mom of a smart, spunky stepdaughter, Katherine enjoys spending time with family and reading as many new books as she can get her hands on. Her YA series, the Ooey Gooey Bakery Mystery series, is ramping up in 2019 with book 1 released in March and book 2 was released June 1, 2019.

Website * Amazon Author Page * Facebook

BookBub * Goodreads * Instagram