I love cozy mysteries about book shops that have memorable characters and a fun plot - and this didn't disappoint. I enjoyed getting to meet the cast of characters and seeing the relationships that developed throughout the story line. Cookie is one of my favs and I love how the author tied this brilliant canine into the story. I jumped in without reading the first book in the series and found k was able to follow along. Overall, an enjoyable read and I look forward to going back to the first book.

A fast read with snappy dialogue. This book was quite a pleasant surprise, as I had not read the first book in this series. It does well as a stand alone.
Lexie is running her parent’s bookstore in her hometown of Confection. When a real estate agent dies of a heart attack, followed closely by her associates death, Lexi thinks something is fishy. Especially when her best friend’s brother is framed for the murder. Enter Detective Chad Berg. Sparks continuously fly between Lexi & Berg as together ( or maybe not together?) they try to solve the case.
A really fun read, not to be missed by all the cozy lovers out there. Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for a digital ARC. All opinions are my own. This review can also be found on my Goodreads page.

Thanks to Netgalley and Crooked Lane Books for the opportunity to read and review this book. This is the second title in Kitt Crowe's Sweet Fiction Bookshoop series. When a real estate agent passes away of a heart attack in her 30s, people are surprised, but given her family history, it is feasible. When another person who worked with the real estate agent turns up dead, Lexi has questions, especially after her best friend's brother is a leading suspect. Lexi, her dog Cookie, and the Macaroons (Lexi's book club) investigate. I enjoyed this book. The characters are fun, and their different interests and skills add to their investigative efforts. I want to know the residents of the town more. Cookie is precious! The mystery is engaging. I will definitely be checking out more of this series. #APoisonousPage #Netgalley

Confection, Oregon is buzzing with festivals and tourists are crawling everywhere but the real drama is unfolding behind closed doors. When local business woman/floozy Marilyn dies of a heart attack, Lexi immediately decides it's murder despite the fact that there is no evidence to suggest otherwise and the woman had a pre-existing heart condition. Everyone, Detective Chad Berg in particular, thinks she's nuts until Marilyn's protégé Rachel turns up dead - in her BFF's brother's backyard. Now Lexi must find the truth before Dash ends up imprisoned for life for a crime the Macaroons know he could never have committed.

I love the setting of this series, the town is super sweet (no pun intended) and I love the idea of constant festivals and the book store with the adorable and brilliant resident dog, Cookie. The characters are all fun, the neurotic baker friend who works with Lexi in the book store and the other friend who's the BFF though we really don't know much about her other than that she's pretty aggressive and her mom is kind of a monster. In the first book Detective Chad Berg mercilessly stalks Lexi, citing her for every minor thing she does wrong, and Lexi baits him by continuing to do things she knows she'll get cited for. It's pretty clear there's some romantic tension there and that boils to the surface in this book.

In the first book as the characters were being introduced and the story was taking shape all of these things were charming but in this book everything became more, until there were some aspects that were caricaturisitic (is that a word?) Cookie is now smarter than most teenagers, she can speak fluent English and can perform any task asked of her in any situation at a moment's notice (mind you she's not a trained performer, she's a recent rescue). In the first book Lexi hints at possibly sticking her toe in the romantic waters, in this book she's got not one, not two, but three men she's panting over. The man she's panting after the most is Detective Chad Berg, who treats her horribly and is constantly harassing her or taking advantage of her. Lexi also closes the bookstore early or in the middle of the day several times, which is not something a business person would do in the middle of a festival busy period. While these are all minor things, they were just enough to throw me off the rhythm.

While I didn't enjoy this book as much as the first, I do like the series overall and will continue to read it.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC.

When I requested this ARC I failed to notice it was #2 in the series. I can’t stand not starting from the beginning so I started with book #1 and was hooked. Book #2 is even better. Cozy romance and great characters. Dreamy square-jawed detectives and flirty cheeky bar owners… oh my. I desperately want to join the Macaroons!!

This book, the second in a series, is a delightful bit of fluff, in the vein of Murder, She Wrote or one of the Janet Evanovich detective murders. Author Kitt Crowe has populated a fun Oregon town with lots of characters, reminiscent of Stars Hollow. Most of the amateur detective and bookstore owner’s friends are younger adults, looking for love or to get ahead, in typical small town life.
The Scooby gang in this case is called the Macaroon club, a book group hosted by Lexi the detective in the back room of her parents’ bookstore, which she manages. Of course she has an adorable dog which gets into all sorts of minor scrapes and is much beloved by almost everyone in town. There is baking and some good books read and bought and sold. And wine figures centrally to the mystery.
There is a large number of characters, most of whom live in town, and I found them a bit hard to follow at times. But I’m sure as one reads more of the series, they will become more familiar. I also found the names of almost all of the locations and businesses too cutesy at times, mostly being colorful sweets. Being set in the town of Confection gives the author license, I suppose.
The plot had several twists and the number of suspects was quite large for a small town. There was plenty to keep me guessing and the story rolled along just fine. I say four out of five stars.
Thanks to NetGalley and Crooked Lane Books for my electronic ARC in exchange for my honest review. This book will be published July 12, 2022.

I love cozy Mystery books a new I can’t wait until this book releases everywhere because it is a great book to read. Thank you NetGalley.

Thanks to #PenguinRandomHouse for the e-galley

This review contains SPOILERS, and the book is a fine, quick read for cozy fans, so you might just want to stop reading now.


I am a cozy mystery fan, but I have a limited tolerance for the cute level in many of the books in the genre, and the town of Confection, OR, with its candy-named streets, gave me pause. However, the book did keep me reading. The characters have potential, though they need a little more clarification and a little more dialogue to become three dimensional, though that's not a requirement of the genre.

At one point, I thought there were too many characters, but at least there were a few plausible red herrings, which is an advantage to a large cast. It was not always easy to keep them all straight, though, and the ending was a surprise, not in a good way. I like to have a puzzle that the reader can figure out, and falling back on a confession is lazy plotting and writing.

I also am not a big fan of the "heroine walks into danger and has to be rescued" trope, and this is two books in a row where that's happened, so I hope the heroine gets smarter or the author mixes it up.

I liked the book pretty well, actually, and I might read one more by the author, but I have no interest in reading the first one in the series. Mildly entertaining for cozy fans. #NetGallery #PoisonousPage

Love, love, love this series! Love the interactions between amateur sleuth Lexi and hunky detective Berg! And of course the main star Cookie! Cant wait for the next one!

Thank you to Net Galley and Crooked Lane Books for an advance copy of this book and exchange for an honest review. This book is about Lexi and her book club group which seemingly gets tangled up in solving murders. There are three murders in the book that are all on the surface seemingly unrelated but Lexi and her group of macaroons crack the code. This book also focuses on Lexi’s new potential love interest. It was a good book overall but I felt the author repeated things a lot and there were a couple too many characters to really get to know each character. Overall I would recommend but it was not my favorite book I’ve read.

romantic, cozy-mystery, Oregon, small-business, small-town, bookseller, law-enforcement, murder, murder-investigation, amateur-sleuth, pets, dog, situational-humor, witty*****

Great characters (especially the amazing pet dog) in this well-paced cozy murder mystery. Lots of plot twists and red herrings with a romantic undercurrent. A good read!
I requested and received a free ebook copy from Crooked Lane Books via NetGalley. Thank you!

So I hate to give a cozy a low rating, especially when I actually enjoyed a lot about the story, but I think there's enough off or missing from this that 2 stars is a fair score.
I read this as an e-book ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Lexi Jones runs her parents' bookstore, Sweet Fiction, in the tourist friendly town of Confection, Oregon, where everyone has capitalized off the name and made desserts their gimmick. At Sweet Fiction, she hosts a book club called the Macaroons that has somehwhat recently morphed into an amateur sleuths league.
When a local business woman with a bit of a reputation is found dead under mysterious circumstances, the Macaroons don't hesitate to open up their own investigation.
Lexi and her dog, Cookie, go fishing for information around for town and she frequently butts heads with a new policeman named Chad Berg, who transferred to Confection from Portland. (I have many questions about this.)
She's also supported by her closest friends, Teri and Cat, as well as her two uncles Jimmy and Elvis, who live down the road from her with their son, Collin.
So that is the brief and quite spoiler-free summary...

And here is a poorly organized listed of my opinions!
(That is sort of spoiler-free)

- The Ripe Raisin is a terrible name for a bar, even if it is an oxymoron... especially when RUM RAISIN is sitting right in front of you. But in general, nothing about the word "raisin" is gonna compel me to visit that pub.

- The way people converse in this book is reasonable at times... but the interactions in the book often range from sounding like a Disney channel sitcom to just being kinda bizarre and unbelievable. A lot is overdramatized, and a lot of people are weirdly forward and direct. The conversation with Nadine at the beginning sounded like 2 eleven year olds who have been watching soap operas, not 2 adult women! And I still don't even know what the beef with them is.
Conversely, despite the melodrama from a lot of side characters, there's really not that much emotion in the places you'd expect to see the book get serious for a moment. Part of that is just how cozies are; no one's reading them to reflect on the grieving process, they're reading them to figure out who put arsenic in the postmaster's milkshake and they aren't too broken up about losing him, But, that tendency stood out a little too strong here and it made the interactions in the book that much less believable.
I also know a bit of rom-commy fluff isn't uncommon in cozies, but the way the women talk about some of the guys is very weird to me. Maybe that's cause I was always just extremely, extremely reserved about that kinda thing and gravitated towards friends who were too, but I don't know.

-The main characters also postulate that several people they know very well could have done it without missing a beat... I would hope, if I found myself coincididentally in suspicious circumstances, that my friends would try to talk themselves out of that a bit harder.

- Why must a genre I've grown so fond of come with so much police simpery?
I get that logistically, they make convenient staple characters... but nobody made you put "protect and serve" multiple times in the same book. I know it was mentioned at one point that Chad left Portland because of an incident he wasn't ethically comfortable with, but I have a feeling if we find out more about that later it's gonna be some minor episode of corruption. If you're going to have a main character that came from one of the most notoriously brutal and corrupt police departments in America, I need that addressed up front. I don't like wondering if the protagonist is spending half the book flirting with someone who spent the last summer shooting rubber bullets at teenagers protesting for civil rights.
I'm not saying you can't have a main character be a cop ever, but the ones I keep reading seem to exist in an alternate reality.
You don't have to go full ACAB to acknowledge that police violence are systemic racism are very real, serious issues and be a litte mindful of that when you're writing these stories. I don't get the impression that the author is actually a thin blue line type; she seems fairly progressive in other areas... I think in a lot of these, they're just really tone deaf. But tone deaf is still bad, and I expected better out of something set to hit the press almost 2 years after George Floyd was murdered at the hands of the state.

- There's several instances of women hitting/slapping men in the book. While I'd applaud that if it was in response to sexual harassment, these were, frankly, domestic violence. The book seems to frame them more as amusing and somehwat justified, though, and I do not like that.

Well, that got kinda grim.
Back to the lighter stuff.

In spite of all I listed above, I thought the mystery portion itself was decent. It might have been a little better if it had kept a more narrow focus leading up to the reveal, but it DIDN"T take the lazy route I see pretty often where the author explcitly misleads you and never actually gives you a fair shot at guessing who's guilty.

The main characters are likeable enough, the setting is cute, and I think the bones of the book has potential for a solid series if it's all brought back a bit closer to reality. The one major change that would instantly improve the book a LOT is making the dialogue and interactions more natural everywhere and to really dial down those exchanges that sounded like they came from a sitcom for children. It'd also really strengthen the high points of this world if we got to see more internal conflict and personal quirks from Lexi.
This was already a long-winded review, and that's all I have for now!

I enjoyed this book. I am a lover of all things sweet and the name of the town, streets, and names of the businesses had me smiling. I came to this series in the second book but I was hooked from the start. I love when authors put animals in books. I love it even better when the animals have their own personality and it shines through the story..COOKIE is the best!! I enjoyed the mystery because it kept you guessing. I can not wait until the next book.

Thank you Crooked Lane Books and NetGalley for the advance read.

This ARC was provided to me via Kindle by Crooked Lane Books and #NetGalley for my honest opinion. Opinions expressed are completely my own.

Shout out to Crooked Lane Books, love their content!


Mitt Crowe and the Sweet Fiction Bookshop series did it again. This cozy mystery has all the right stuff for a promising series.

This book had all the ingredient for a nice book. Its a kind of murder she wrote. A bookclub, a few murders, a bookstore and a handsome police officer. The story is nice and entertainen bult, it didnt kept my attention. Drifted off a lot. If you are a romantic easy thriller ready you Will probably enjoy it but for me it was juist a fun read.
As it is book 2 in a serie it can be read as a stand alone.

It’s summer festival time in Confection, Oregon, and that means a barrage of tourists making cash registers ring at Sweet Fiction Bookshop. But what should be bookseller Lexi’s most lucrative time of year turns disturbing when a member of the chamber of commerce suddenly dies of a heart attack. Not entirely unexpected—considering her family history—but it’s a different story when another chamber member dies just one week later…also, presumably, of natural causes. This was a fun, twisty mystery that kept me guessing until the end. I liked the relationship between Lexi and the detective and I am hoping that continues in further books. This is a fast read that will hold you until the end. Thank you NetGalley for the advanced readers copy for review.

Through NetGalley, I received a free copy of A POISONOUS PAGE (Book 2 of the Sweet Fiction Bookshop Mysteries), by Kitt Crowe, in exchange for an honest review. Lexi and the Macaroon Book Club are on the case in this second installment of the Sweet Fiction Bookshop Mysteries. When an elderly member of the community passes away of seemingly natural causes, that seems normal. When a youngish member of the chamber of commerce dies of a heart attack, it seems suspicious, but there’s a family history that mitigates the suspicion. When another youngish member of the chamber dies shortly thereafter of seemingly natural causes, it strains credulity. Soon, Lexi’s friend Dash is singled out as suspect number one for the simple fact that he dated both the second and third deceased. Lexi and the Macaroons, with a little help from one smart puppy and with possibly even some assistance from “Mt. Bachelor,” work together to clear Dash’s name.

I enjoyed this book. I recommend it as well as the first book in the series.

#APoisonousPage #NetGalley

This is a fast paced whodunit with likable characters. It is summer festival time and that means lots of customers at the Sweet Fiction Bookstore. Things become disturbing when a member of the chamber of commerce suddenly dies of a heart attack. Then another chamber member dies one week later. Then Lexi's friend Dash is accused of murder. He had dated both of the woman that died. Lexi sets out to clear Dashes name with the help of her Macaroon Book Club. She learns that there were a string of secretive real estate transactions discussed by the chamber. This is a great mystery with romance and an adorable smart dog. I recommend this book.

You are in for a fast, twisty ride alongside likeable characters in this enjoyable read. Looking forward to more in this series.

Kitt Crowe's second Sweet Fiction Bookshop mystery doesn’t disappoint! The characters in this series are like sleuthing with friends. Lexi jumps head first to help Dash out of trouble. Lots of twist and turns in this fast paced mystery.
#APoisonousPage #NetGalley