A Dash of Death

A Cocktails and Catering Mystery, Book 1

By: Michelle Hillen Klump

Narrated by: Lisa Negron

There’s bad news for Samantha Warren: the plucky Houston, Texas, reporter lost her job and her fiancé in rapid succession. But Sam has a way of making lemonade out of the bitterest of lemons.

At a meeting of the local historical-homes council, she serves up the homemade bitters that she made as gifts for her wedding party. She intends to use that as her “in” to become an in-demand party mixologist. But the party’s over for one of the council members, who keels over dead soon after he sips the bereft bride’s bitter brew. It turns out that the victim, Mark, was poisoned, his drink spiked with oleander. Since Sam mixed the drink that Mark imbibed right before his demise, she finds herself at the front of the suspect line. Now, she’ll have to use all of her reporter’s wisdom and wiles to clear her name. Who could have wanted Mark dead? His wife, Gabby? His girlfriend, Darcy? Someone who wanted his seat on the council? Or another citizen of this sweet Texas town that holds some seedy secrets?

Job hunting, building her mixology business, and fending off late-night phone calls from her nearly betrothed don’t leave much time for sleuthing. But if Sam can’t “pour” over the clues to find the killer, it may soon be last call for her.

©2022 Michelle Hillen Klump (P)2022 Dreamscape Media, LLC

homey Houston!

I really enjoyed the cozy details and history of Houston. Can't wait to try the recipes!

Interesting new series

The characters in this book and the plot have good potential! I enjoyed the interaction between Sam and her friends and I also enjoyed how Sam decided that she was going to prove herself innocent. Yes, the Mixology stuff was interesting too!
Now to what I didn’t like.
Her fiancé was just awful! For someone to make those decisions like he did for me, I would’ve kicked his butt to the curb too! Lol
Now for the narrator. I’m sorry Michelle, but if you are going to keep up the series please get a Mail narrator to add to the near ration or get a different female narrator that can do male characters. Either way you are going to have to switch something out in order to make this book sell more sequels in audible format. Normally I don’t have much to say about narrators as to complaining. But the narrator is very bad at doing male character voices. I tried the series and I will probably buy the sequel if you change out the situation with the narrator! Otherwise, I may not be that invested to buy another copy and may not even bother to read it in e-book.

Pretty Good

A Dash of Death is a pretty good cozy mystery with engaging characters and an entertaining plot. The story is realistic and the narrator did a good job giving a voice to individual characters. I look forward to the next one in this series.

Good story…

I enjoyed the story but had a hard time listening to the narrator, she was much to robotic and mispronounced many words.