Criminal Confections by Colette London

One of my New Year's resolutions this year was to take some time off to relax, so for the past few weekends, I've spent time reading books. And I don't mean cookbooks, although I adore those, too.

Nope, I've been reading fiction.

My latest was Criminal Confections by Colette London. The main character is a chocolate expert who goes to a chocolate retreat where a murder is committed. Of course, the murder could be an accident, which is what most people believe.

The chocolate expert and her pal, a good-looking ex-con in the security business, start nosing around ... and then someone else dies - murder or accident.

Meanwhile, there's a lot of chocolate, so much so that when I was about halfway through the book, I wondered how anyone could enjoy that much chocolate in real life. And the next day I baked a pan of brownies.

At the end of the book, there are several recipes using chocolate. I didn't try any of the recipes, but I probably will.

This book is an easy read - I polished it off in a single day - and it's well written with just a couple hiccups that temporarily pulled me out of the story, like when the narrator broke that fourth wall and spoke right to the reader. I suppose that was used for effect, but for me, it disturbed the flow of the story for the moment. It wasn't a huge problem, though, and didn't affect my total enjoyment of the book.

The best part of this book was that I had no idea who the murderer was until the very end of the book, and once revealed, it made sense. So that's a huge plus.

I'll be looking for more books by this author in the future.

I received a digital version of this book from Netgalley for the purpose of a review.