The Sour Taste of Suspicion

An Angel Lake Mystery

By: CeeCee James

Narrated by: Jennifer Groberg

The only thing worse than living in a haunted house is somebody trying to make you the next ghost. When Elise takes a position at spooky old Montgomery Manor as companion to her friend Lavina's great aunt, she's expecting an easy job for the holidays. What she doesn't expect are dead bodies, ghosts and a murderer who's picked her as the next target.

Delving into the secrets and tragedies of the past, her only clue is a doll's house from which pieces keep mysteriously disappearing. But what is the connection between the doll's house and the real one? Is Montgomery Manor really haunted, or is there something even more sinister afoot?

Elise will have to use all her all her ingenuity to answer the questions - and fast, or she just might find she's the house's newest ghost.

©2016 CeeCee James (P)2017 CeeCee James

Fantastic and interesting

Loved the book. The author did a great job with the characters and the story line. I loved the narrator. She did a great job with her animations.

A Sour Taste of a Sweet Cozy Mystery

What made the experience of listening to The Sour Taste of Suspicion the most enjoyable?

The cozies I've read often had nosy or annoying amateur sleuths. Elise was fun and innocently curious. I really liked her character's personality, interactions, reactions, and relationships. I will pick up more of CeeCee's audiobooks. They are enjoyable to listen to. I had not expected to complete it so quickly!

Did the plot keep you on the edge of your seat? How?

Cozies don't exactly keep me on the edge of my seat, as a thriller would. But I did find myself trying to piece together the whodunit and why while I listened as the story unfolded.

What does Jennifer Groberg bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

Jennifer had a whimsical voice and made exactly southern drawls for Auntie and Livinia. I would pick up a book simply because she is the narrator (***hint, hint, hint - Keep her, CeeCee! ***)

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

This author puts a lot of thought in her one liners - it would work great as the tag line for a movie as well.

Any additional comments?

I would recommend this audiobook, author, and narrator!

Such a great escape

I have thoroughly enjoyed this series. What a great way to escape and de-stress. Don’t know what I’m going to do if I run out of the audible additions as I listen on my commute to and from work.

Good book. Great narrator!

Elise is tired of living on ramen noodles, so she realizes she needs to find employment other than just as a dog walker as A Sour Taste of Suspicion by CeeCee James opens. Fortunately, her best friend, Lavina, has just the thing. Lavina's rich Aunt Myrtle is getting up in years and needs a companion while she lives at the antebellum Montgomery Manor. Her family has found someone, but until that person can arrive, they want Elise to live at the manor with Aunt Myrtle. There are servants to wait on her, but she needs someone to socialize with. The deal sealer is the large sum the family is prepared to pay Elise.

But things immediately start out on a sour note and only get stranger. As Elise goes to take a shower soon after having arrived, she pulls back the shower curtain to find the stabbed body of the gardener in the tub. Then, things get creepier as items start disappearing, both in the house and in the dollhouse that is modeled after the original manor house. Aunt Myrtle explains away everything as being done by her older sister, Anna. The only problem is that Anna died in a freak accident more than 60 years earlier, but which the girls' mother blamed upon Myrtle. When Elise learns that her own great-great-grandma Constance was Aunt Myrtle's nurse, she feels a special connection that makes her feel drawn to help Aunt Myrtle.

This book was enjoyable to listen to. Though rather short (a mere four hours and 16 minutes), the book does a good job of gripping the reader and making us really curious about the strange happenings. In order to remain a traditional cozy mystery, a book cannot be paranormal, so I was sure that the strange occurrences had a natural explanation, but that just made the book all the more intriguing. I found the plot to have creative details and the characters to be relatable.

I really loved the performance of Jennifer Groberg as she read the audiobook. With a fully credible Southern accent that remained still easy for all to follow, she seems to have been an ideal selection to narrate this book. She made good voices and excellent intonations in her rendering of this book for readers like me to listen to.

I really liked listening to The Sour Taste of Suspicion and think that it will appeal to plenty of other readers too. It will help some if you listen to the first two books in the series, but it isn't crucial. I look forward to moving on to the next book. I give this book four stars!

The sour taste of suspicion

This is a really good cozy mystery! Lots of kooky characters to smile about. This author is so good!