Retro Reading: Sugar and Iced by Jenn McKinlay
This Year's Sweet Tiara Crown is Tarnished
It's time once again for the annual Sweet Tiara contest and this year as it celebrates its Diamond Jubilee, the Fairy Tale Cupcake girls are asked to participate, but had they known there would be a murder, they would have declined.
In the sixth installment of the Cupcake Mystery series, Sugar and Iced Melanie Cooper and Angie DeLaura agree to bake the little cakes and create a cupcake challenge for the beauty pageant contestants. As a favor to Melanie's mom's best friend the girls agree to helping out and also, their employee Oz Ruiz's friend Lupe has decided to enter the pageant.
Lupe enters the pageant with the hope of winning a full scholarship to the college of her choice but wasn't ready for all of the craziness associated with the competing. However, when one of the judges, Mariel Mars, is found dead on the second day of the pageant, Lupe becomes the prime suspect since she did threaten the judge in the lobby of the resort.
If you remember from the last installment, Melanie had broken up with Angie's brother, Joe. Throughout this installment, Joe continues his pursuit of her affections and Melanie continues to weigh the pros and cons of marriage. As everyone points out to her, her fears are baseless since her fear is that he'll leave her. She blames herself for her father's death and subsequently afraid that everyone else in her life will somehow abandon her through no fault of her own.
Evidence against Lupe mounts as her fingerprints are found on the scarf used to strangle Mariel and while she may be the prime suspect the other contestants avoid her as if she were the plague but she does have at least one ally in the form of Mel's mother.
For the seventh installment, I can guarantee the book will be revolving around one of the characters' upcoming wedding which was something of a shocker. And I can see why someone can go all "Annie Wilkes" on an author because I can tell you, you will be upset at author Jenn McKinlay.
While I enjoyed this installment, the movie quoting still bothered me (almost right out of the gate) and maybe I hadn't noticed it before, but there were a lot of times when I think McKinlay was trying to add suspense by using phrases such as "Melanie heard a familiar voice" or "she thought the voice sounded familiar, but wasn't sure who it was until she realized it was Joe's deep voice." Phrases like this seemed to appear on every page and "the voice" did get pretty old after awhile. Little things like this did become annoying to me.
