Melanie West is getting her life back on track after a messy divorce when her grandmother, Liza Harris, asks her to open a B&B with her. Together, Liza and Melanie purchase a purportedly haunted mansion on the Oregon coast and jump right into clearing out the cobwebs. But while attempting to remove wallpaper in an upstairs bedroom, the new B&B owners stumble upon a very real skeleton in their closet.
The police suspect the skeleton is that of the wife of the previous owner of the B&B, but no one in town seems to want to say much about her. As the inn owners try to juggle renovations with their own amateur investigations, their grand opening looms closer and closer--and a friendly ghost in their walls starts playing tricks. But it all comes crashing to a halt when a new body is found stabbed to death on the beach below the inn--the victim chillingly close in resemblance to Melanie herself.
It seems someone doesn't appreciate newcomers prying into the small town's past, and now it's up to Melanie and Liza to get to the bottom of these murders to save their business...and their lives.
I don’t know why but a lot of bed and breakfast books take place on the Oregon coast. It is a little spooky, but not enough to justify the number of cozy Mysteries and thrillers that take place. Surely, everyone has watched Goonies one too many times. I can not of course blame them as that is one of my favorite movies.
Dead and Breakfast is no different. This is a cozy romance/mystery that takes place on the Oregon coast.
After a pretty nasty divorce, Melanie decides that she is going to move in with her grandmother and they are going to open a bed and breakfast. Obviously money is an issue so they decide they are going to do it all themselves, the repairs, the renovations, etc. This house is beautiful, full of junk as the last owner just left everything, and in need of some seriously new wallpaper.
Everything is going smooth until a false door in the bathroom upstairs opens to display a body, a skeleton to be exact. Since is it now a crime scene, they can’t continue to renovate the upstairs, which means they can also not open up when they had hoped to.
When things look like they can’t get worse, Melanie thinks that someone is following her and then a lady that kind of resembles Melanie is killed, sending her beloved pooch to the big house. Melanie feels bad for said pooch and goes to meet it. While I won’t spoil a lot of this story, I will say that said pooch goes home with Melanie and she discovers what it is really like to have a large dog around a house.
I enjoyed this book for the most part. There would be parts that are slow and then it would speed up just to slow down again. The one thing that got me was the fact that they spent a lot of time talking and not enough time acting, in my mind. Obviously they did act, against the police’s warnings.
It makes for a good book, but do specifically women go behind police’s backs all the time. Of all the books I read a year, there always seems that there are women going behind the hot policeman’s back in order to save the day, discover the killer, find the ghost, etc. I guess I didn’t realize this was a common trope until lately, and now I am seeing it everywhere, even outside of cozy mystery books.
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