I love watching Golden Girls so this was a very entertaining read that brought the characters to life very vividly.

Rose’s cousin Nettie and her fiancé Jason are at loose ends when their wedding venue in St. Olaf has to cancel their reservation. When Rose promises to incorporate all of the traditional St. Olaf wedding customs, the two move the wedding to Miami, with Rose as host. When a body is found during the tea-and-fish themed kickoff to the wedding week and Dorothy is the prime suspect, all four Golden Girls set out to prove her innocence – and to ensure the wedding goes off without a hitch.

When I requested this book from NetGalley, it didn’t register at first that the Golden Girls in the series name were *the Golden Girls we watched on television back in the late 1980s. Once that sunk in, I couldn’t wait to read the book to see how the ladies were portrayed on the page compared to on the screen. The author stayed true to their characters – man-hungry Blanche, kind but air-headed Rose, cranky Dorothy and ‘tough woman’ Sophia, allowing me to see and hear them in my head as I read the book. I lost track of how many times I rolled my eyes or even thought “ewww!” as the St. Olaf wedding week traditions were explained, but they made me chuckle at the same time.

The murder victim had barely been introduced before the body was found, so we didn’t know much about him. The investigation didn’t turn up much either, until a point in the story that took me totally by surprise. From there, it was relatively easy to figure out both who (in a general sense) was behind the murder and the motive.

This book is described as #1 in a new series, so I will keep an eye out for book #2, if only to see what mystery these ladies come up against next.

THE NOSTALGIA! As an OG Golden Girls fan the premise for this had me so excited and the author delivered! While reading, I absolutely heard each character's voice as I went. The story stayed true to the GG vibes with a bit of sarcasm, Rose stories, and Dorothy's resting b*tch face. It truly was a perfect cozy mystery and such a light hearted read. I loved it so much I ordered a physical copy. I am hoping this will be a series because the world needs this escapism right now.

Thank you to NetGalley and Hyperion Avenue for this advanced copy!

If you’re a Golden Girls fan, I think you’re in for a treat! The girls are back together and you won’t be able to read this book without hearing their voices! If you’re not a Golden Girls fan or don’t know much about the show, this is going to be a strange book for you! It definitely plays on jokes from the show especially in this book that mostly features Rose and her St. Olaf quirks. It IS funny, but at times felt too long. There’s a lot of running around without much progress made in the story. Go into it knowing that this is going to be a very cheesy Golden Girls storyline and not at all a serious mystery and I think you’ll enjoy it!

If you love the tv show Golden Girls, then you will love this book. Each character’s voice rings true throughout this novel, along with all the quirky antics you expect from this dynamic group of women. This is the perfect cozy mystery that will keep you engaged from the first page. The only thing that I will comment on is if Blanch is your favorite character she really isn’t highlighted as much as the other characters. This story truly focusses on Rose, Dorothy and Sophia.
Thank you so much to Hyperion Avenue and Netgalley for allowing me to read an advance copy of this title.

Enjoyable treat for Golden Girls fans. I couldn't read this without hearing Dorothy, Rose, Blanche, and Sophia's voices in my head reading each of their lines, which made it a bit slow going, but also like I was watching a lost episode of the TV show. Some of the St Olaf jokes got old and I could have done with less of the St Olaf wedding traditions and a bit more investigating, but overall it was a fun read and I thought it captured the characters pretty well. A few anachronisms, but as I read an ARC, they may have been cleaned up by the final copy.

so, here is the issue right up front... the language and writing is a bit stilted and the characters at times seem forced. It was fun to see "the girls" together again and a cozy mystery but I agree with others that at time it felt like so-so fan fiction. Should the series continue I'd love to see vast improvements in the dialogue and pacing.

A cozy mystery set in the Golden Girls universe.

As much fun as it is to spend some time with the Girls, Murder by Cheesecake is a bit muddled. We have two stories happening at once: Rose's niece's wedding and the discovery of a murder victim. A cute and fluffy book; 2.5 rounded up.

“Picture it- Sicily 1884”.

The Golden Girls have been a source of joy and comfort of mine for mannny years💗

I really have to pat this author on the back for how well she encapsulated and portrayed each personality of the individual girls in her writing! The language, the mannerisms, the emotions - all of it was spot on!

Oh Rose… poor naive (but sweet) rose 😅 iykyk. Blanche? As ‘riskay’ and horny as ever in this book (which is saying a lot!). Dorothy- the mom of the group; comforting, smart, and ready to pop off on anyone and their brother at any moment to protect her girls. AND ✨SOPHIAAA the savage✨ is and always will be my spirit animal, through and through. I just love that old, sarcastic, hilarious woman so much🤣 and her hidden-away undying love for Dorothy always brings tears to my eyes 🥹🥲

I did find the plot to be underwhelming and lacking, and I almost DNF’d this book on multiple occasions after I had read the words “St Olaf” for the hundredth time 🙃 BUT the girls and their adventure totally made this worth reading 💛 Can’t wait to read the rest of the series!

Thank you for awarding me this ARC!

Stay Golden, my friends ☺️

Posted to Goodreads: 4/13/2025

If you loved The Golden Girls, this cozy mystery will take you right back to their coral couches. Featuring the beloved characters, this book focuses on Dorothy's efforts to clear her name, and Rose's efforts at giving her niece a St. Olaf wedding, which is threatened when a body is found at the groom's family hotel. Hilarious and sweet, this was a great cozy mystery which highlighted the power of friendship and love. I was able to read a copy of this book through NetGalley and hope it finds others who want to spend some time with their favorite characters.

I’d like to start by thanking NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me to read an ARC.

As someone who has throughly enjoyed Golden Girls, I absolutely loved this. It was mostly from on girls POV and was more about the girls problems rather than the murder in the first half, but it was enjoyable to spend more time with the girls being themselves.

If this weren’t an IP it would receive a lower score, but I went in expecting something cozy and not sophisticated or too descriptive of the characters, and it ended up a wonderful, fun, goofy, and nostalgic experience.

The girls are at it again, but this time, someone turns up dead. Rose is in the midst of planning a wedding for her beloved cousin, Nettie, ensuring all of the traditional St. Olaf wedding events are met. Meanwhile, Dorothy is trying to find love through a VHS dating service, wanting someone to attend the wedding with. Unfortunately, when the first event of the wedding week rolls around, Dorothy's date is found expired in the fridge - right on top of the cheesecake Rose needs for the Welcome Tuna Teatime. Dorthy is suddenly the center of attention and the main person of interest. There's too much going on! Rose has to save the wedding and her friend. Dorothy must prove her innocence and mourn the man she only met once. Blanche is...there to flirt. And Sophia is in charge of sharing her knowledge of Miami with the St. Olaf crew - oh, and also saving her daughter. With only days to go until the big day, the pressure is on. Will the girls solve who killed Dorothy's date? Will Nellie get her St. Olaf-ian wedding?

I wanted to love this because I L O V E The Golden Girls, and this was the perfect event for the girls. However, some parts were overly clichéd, and the first twist was easy to guess. I wanted more of a feel of a Golden Girls episode. Also, Blanche did not get the time she deserved! Most of the story naturally focuses on Rose and Dorothy, but Sophia also has a major role. Poor Blanche is just there as a background character at times. Overall, this was a quick read and kept me relatively engaged. I don't think I'll be picking up the next book in the series despite my love for these quirky cozy mysteries. If you're a fan of The Golden Girls, I would give this a try! Just don't go in with super high expectations, and you'll probably enjoy it.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Read if you like:
🍰 GOLDEN GIRLS 🩷🩷🩷
🍰 senior crime solvers
🍰 cast of quirky characters
🍰 small town setting

I really really love the whole senior citizens teaming up to solve a murder genre 🩷🩷
I really enjoyed the graphics at the top of each chapter 💕 It adds some fun and even makes the pages more exciting than just the boring black text.
THEY SERVED THE CHEESECAKE THAT THEY FOUND A DEAD BODY ON TOP OF?????? yuckkkkkk
I love chapter titles!! No one ever does that anymore, and it reminds me so much of books I read as a child 💕
This book really came together in the end, and I did not see it coming! I love when I am surprised in the end of a murder mystery.
I really enjoyed this book and all of the characters in it. I really hope this becomes a series so I can read more! Thanks so much to Hyperion Avenue and Rachel Ekstrom Courage for this advanced copy in exchange for an honest review 💕

Do you remember the 1980s TV show The Golden Girls? If you haven't seen the show, you can stream the first season free on PlutoTV (the other seasons are on a subscription streaming channel). For those who know what I'm talking about - can you imagine them as amateur sleuths? Racheal Ekstrom Courage does and she's written a cozy mystery featuring Rose, Blanche, Dorothy, and Sophia.

I often watch movies and television shows based on books. There are a few of those adaptions that I watched before reading. But I don't usually read a book based on a television show. The only one I can think of is the Veronica Mars book I read but I think it was written by someone associated with the show. I have a couple of other books on my shelf that were on the screen before coming to the page.

When I saw Murder by Cheesecake I thought it sounded like it would be a fun read. What I remember of the show, the Girls often found themselves in crazy situations so I hoped their on-screen comedy could translate to the page.

The start of the book was really focused on trying to establish the chemistry that fans of the show will remember well. I don't know if Courage was trying too hard or if it just couldn't translate. A lot of the comedy of the show was due to timing and body language which are both difficult to write. I was finding it so unfunny that I started to wonder if I just remembered the show being funny. So I went to IMDB to see if the show was streaming anywhere. The little clip from the show that was playing on The Golden Girls page had me immediately smiling (and there wasn't any sound so it was just their interaction and body language). For me, the show wasn't translating well.

But when we got to the murder, the book really picked up for me. I loved the murder mystery part of this book. It gives the Girls plenty of opportunities to find themselves in crazy situations as they try to go undercover and search for clues to clear one of their won.

If their investigation doesn't provide enough entertainment, Rose is planning a true St. Olaf wedding right in the heart of Miami. The traditions may seem to be weird, but they all have a very sentimental meaning. Such as the clown is a reminder to them that a happy marriage should be filled with levity and love (unless, of course, you have a clown phobia but no one present did so it turned out somewhat okay - they let Sophia find the clown!)

Courage definitely writes a fun cozy mystery and if she writes another with her own characters I will definitely check it out. For the nostalgic factor, this was worth the read.

My review will be published at Girl Who Reads on Monday - https://www.girl-who-reads.com/2025/04/murder-by-cheesecake-by-rachel-ekstrom.html

DNF at 15%. It read like bad fan fiction. Or too kitschy. I just couldn’t do it. I admit I am a mood reader though, so it’s possible that my mood was looking for something a little more emotional, dark or angsty. And - for a murder mystery it had zero mysterious vibes. There was nothing to make me actually care.

I have watched Golden Girls for as long as I can remember with both my mom and my grandmother. I was really really hoping to be able to recommend and/or buy Murder by Cheesecake for some of the bigger fans in my life. Unfortunately, the book didn’t quite land for me.

While the characters and setting were factually correct, they felt somewhat forced or inauthentic to me. This could just be an unfortunate side effect of going from screen to page, and it seems like many other people fully enjoyed the book.

I will also say that I felt like the mystery took a bit long to get going, and I felt a bit like the book was spoon feeding or railroading me at the upfront. I did not end up finishing the book.

Murder By Cheesecake is a delightful that is a new twist on the Golden Girls. Anyone who has watched the show will enjoy reading the book. It follows Rose's niece who is in town getting married. While there wedding activities are going on, Dorothy tries to find a date for the wedding. The date doesn't go as planned and she is disappointed. Later that week, her date ends up dead, face down in a cheesecake at a wedding event hosted by Rose.

The book captures each ladies personality and it is a fun read for any fan. The book brings in the flavor of Miami with traditions of Rose's hometown, St. Olaf.

The book felt like an extended episode to me and alot of fun to read!

As a lifelong fan of The Golden Girls, diving into Murder by Cheesecake felt like reuniting with old friends. The banter between Dorothy, Rose, Blanche, and Sophia was spot-on, capturing the show's spirit that remains one of my all-time favorite comfort sitcoms. The nostalgic charm was undeniable, and I appreciated the author's effort to bring these beloved characters back to life.

However, the mystery element left much to be desired. The premise—a dead man found in a freezer during a wedding—had potential, but the story focused excessively on the wedding preparations and St. Olaf traditions. The investigation into the murder felt sidelined, making it hard to stay engaged with the plot.

I lost interest around the 70% mark and ultimately decided not to finish. While the character interactions were enjoyable, the lack of emphasis on the mystery made it difficult to stay invested. That said, I’m open to giving the next installment a try, hoping for a better balance between character-driven moments and a compelling mystery.

Thank you to Hyperion for a gifted copy in exchange for an honest review.

I love me a cozy mystery (preferably set in the Cotswolds, featuring a cast of cardigan-clad villagers, and scads of scones with clotted cream) as much as the next girl. Yet, as you well know, it’s not exactly my genre of choice, given a general lack of romance and a whole shaker of spice. However, when I saw the title Murder by Cheesecake and then, more importantly, the subtitle A Golden Girls Cozy Mystery pop up in my ARC dashboard, I couldn’t resist. Many an rainy afternoon (I was only allowed to watch TV if precipitation required my fisherman-grade raincoat) was spent cuddled on the sofa, listening to the dulcet drawl of Blanche, the bad-ass sarcasm of Dorothy and Sofia, and the midwestern zaniness of Rose. On a grey and gloomy New England day, what tween wouldn’t want to escape to the sunny and, to me, foreign paradise of Miami, as seen through the eyes of a quartet of well-coiffed retirees. I obviously had to read this book. Golden girls + cheesecake + murder = a good time (obviously).

I’ll give it to the author, Rachel Ekstrom Courage, who clearly loves the ladies of her source material. The book is so authentic to the voice of each of its leading ladies that you can’t not read it without hearing Blanche’s purr, Dorothy’s gravitas, Sofia’s Sicilian curses, and Rose’s, well, Rose-ness. It’s the latter that Courage pins her tale upon, as Rose’s beloved cousin / niece (it’s a thing), Nettie, is unable to get married in St. Olaf (for all the herring-y wackiness that entails, as you can imagine) and is now getting married - at Rose’s behest lest she has to endure an elopement - in her fiance’s hometown, Miami. We’ve thus got a real fish out of water situation (all piscine puns intended), as the uptight and elderly St. Olaf’s contingency clashes with Jason’s hotel-owning, Miami-elite parents. And we, of course, benefit, courtesy of the fact that the happy couple must uphold all of the obscure Norwegian traditions - most of which feature pickled fish - in order to access Nettie’s trust.

Speaking of trust, our fab four find a crack in theirs for one another when Rose, upon removing her hundred homemade cheesecakes from the industrial freezer of Jason’s parents hotel, stumbles upon a dead body. On the first night of a week’s worth of already questionable St. Olaf-themed mandatory celebrations, but of course. Things quickly go from bad to worse when the corpse is ID’d by Dorothy as the man whom she’d really clicked with - from a VHS dating service video - before being unceremoniously dumped by him halfway through their first date. As though Dorothy’s ego hadn’t suffered enough after finally putting herself back out there, her freedom takes a beating too, as she becomes the police’s prime suspect, as her date, as it turns out, has a checkered history of conning women out of their savings. Since both the St. Olaf relatives and the Miami hoteliers now both blame Rose for putting the nuptials in jeopardy, she, bless her naive little heart, needs an outlet for her own frustration and turns on Dorothy.

Collective gasps aside, the rest of the story follows our favorite almost-sestegenarions (seriously, these women, save Sofia, were in their early-to-mid 50s! I’m just going to pause, and maybe have a stiff drink, at the fact that I’m apparently close enough in age to retire to Miami. Shady Pines, here I come!) as they work to both salvage the wedding AND clear Dorothy Zbornak’s good, albeit hard-to-pronounce, name. The latter requires some reconnaissance work that is not limited to: Dorothy being disguised as a “lady of the night”, Sofia’s hiring of a stripper clown for Nettie’s bachelorette, and Rose and Blanche doing their best Miami Vice impression as they shake down patrons at one of Miami’s gay bars. Couple this cozy silliness with 80s references for days (Aquanet! Love’s Baby Soft! Stetson cologne!) and one red herring after another - soft-hearted Rose is the one who comes to the stark realization that anyone (even a St. Olafian) could be the murderer - and you’ve got exactly what you hoped you would when gazed upon the delightfully-designed cover: devoted friendship, a mystery that’s just twisty-and-turny enough to make you, like the title ladies themselves, keep a notebook of suspects, and retro nostalgia.

So even it’s not my usual cup of (chamomile) tea, I’m more than happy to have spent the better part of my sunny spring weekend (I threw on an extra layer and read outside, so my mom would be proud) with the Golden Girls on their inaugural murder mystery and am looking forward to the next, since you know Blanche’s already got a body count, of sorts, on her perfectly manicured hands. In the interim, thank you, Rachel Ekstrom Courage, for being a friend of the show and a pretty entertaining writer to boot.

I loved the idea of this book, but it didn’t land for me. I do feel that the author captured the essence of each of the characters, but the storyline seemed a little unrealistic for me. It was an easy read, but I wish the whodunnit murder mystery plot was a little more developed and believable. Overall, a nostalgic and fun read.