Fatal Fudge

Cursed Candy Mysteries, Book 3

By: Cate Lawley

Narrated by: Meg Price

Magical mind control

Lina accidentally gave a batch of her fudge an extra wallop. Anyone who eats it becomes suggestible. Very suggestible.

Is it mind control?

First a nun robs a liquor store, then a kindergarten teacher punches a pedestrian. The International Criminal Witch Police are certain Lina’s fudge is to blame. When a third crime demonstrates an escalating pattern of violence, Lina is terrified a fourth offense will end with murder.

Does the mastermind behind the crimes have a twisted sense of humor, or is there a more sinister connection behind the crimes?

Join Lina as she cleans up the last (she hopes!) of her cursed candy messes and tracks down a potential killer.

©2020 Catherine G. Cobb (P)2021 Catherine G. Cobb

Missing some elements for me

I may be alone in this, but after listening to the first two books I thought that we were going to eventually get to a point where we were learning more about the main character. For example, what’s the deal with her parents? What motivated her to start this business? She mentions deciding that Boise was the right city, but we don’t get any details about how she came to that decision. Does she have any friends of any kind that aren’t people she met in the first book? Unfortunately she seems to have no real backstory at all, and thus feels really shallow to me as a character. Perhaps that’s coming in the next book now that the fudge has been tracked down, but it seems odd to wait this long to flesh out your main protagonist.

Also, despite the fact that the murders have all centered around her accidentally enchanted candy, we spend almost no time in her shop at all and never once actually see her producing candy or doing anything creative. I think we’ve only been inside the actual shop, as readers, right before she gets arrested in the first book and for a few minutes when she’s training Sabrina, and I *think* at the end of this one when talking to her cousin. We hear that it’s a Halloween-themed candy store, and supposedly in this book Halloween is right around the corner, but we still get no details about what the place looks like, what kinds of candy she’s offering, how she makes them…idk. I often listen to these kinds of stories for the coziness of imagining having a lovely little creative and delicious business. Maybe that’s just me. But because we don’t see any of that, her complaints about just wanting to get back to making candy and not deal with murders anymore fall rather flat, because this is all we’ve ever seen her do. There’s no real sense of a routine being disrupted or any indication of a life before all this started happening to her.

The mystery in this one was a nice inversion of expectation, and the solution they come up with is creative and interesting. But I really have a hard time connecting with Lina or getting invested in her when she feels so flimsy to me.