Customer Reviews

Bell, Cook, and Candle: An Angie Amalfi Mystery

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4 star:		(1)
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After the last book in this series, I was ready for Angie and Paavo to start talking marriage. Well, so was Paavo! But Joanne Pence skillfully keeps us in suspense about that as well as about the identity of the ritualistic killer who seems to be targeting Angie for his ultimate victim until the exciting climax. I look forward to the next mystery in this series because with Joanne's talent, she's bound to keep readers in suspense about pulling off a wedding while scaring the daylights out of us with a clever mystery. She has another winner on her hands!

Angie Amalfi's new Comical Cake business is very time consuming, yet successful. It however is putting a definite strain on her friendships and social life. Paavo wants to propose, but she is too busy. And to top it off, a really creepy Baron, who runs a Goth club wants her to bake him a cake. Paavo is engrossed in a series of grisly ritualistic murders.

This is a pretty entertaining mystery. Amazon recommended it and I gave it a try. The characters are a bit bizarre and fit in excellently with the story line. There are many twists and turns in the plot and I enjoyed it a great deal.

After numerous false starts, plenty of failures, and several times quitting out of boredom, Angle Arnolf has finally found a business that she performs well and that people appreciate. "Commercial Cakes" is doing so well that Angie barely has time to sleep. This frustrates her boyfriend homicide detective Paavo Smith, who after much deliberating, has finally worked up the courage to ask her to marry him.

Every time Paavo begins to propose, Angie is distracted, called to the phone or falls asleep. She ends up hiring two employees who are into the Goth scene while Paavo happens to work on a serial killer case involving Goths. He doesn't know how, but based on experience with his beloved, Paavo expects Angie is going to become involved in his case though he hates it when she places her life in danger.

Joanne Pence writes an ingenious mystery that is both hilarious and deadly serious, sometimes at the same time. The proposal scenes are hysterical while the action scenes involving the Goth cult are frightening even as they seem otherworldly. BELL, COOK AND CANDLE is a humorous novel that has cross-genre appeal.

Harriet Klausner

The first several pages were riveting. They read like a true mystery with gutsy horror-implants.

Then Angie staged in with her shining silver Mercedes, spitting through an argument with her friend, Connie, all the while dripping blood-spiced words here and there which subliminaled the reader with flashes to the rat crunching, blood-spewing, opening scene. Oh my!

Definitely workable as entertaining fiction, BELL, COOK and CANDLE, a paranormal/culinary with astrology in its plot, delves into the demonic, ugly side of witchcraft. As the back flap on BC&C says, its plot has a "Dash of Darkness."

While the whole book was great, the second half was an absolute, relentless capture, with the plot machinations rolling well and the characters growing deeper. How did Pence do this so adeptly, within the boundaries of a paranormal culinary?

Possibly I should mention, though, that if a reader is craving a cozy with drool-inducing food references, and recipes woven sensually, mouth watering-ly into the plot, this title does not do a depth charge there. The main character, Angie Amalfi, is testing an ingenious new business called COMICAL CAKES, and three recipes are included at the end of the story, but the cooking/eating process does not overwhelm 95% of the plot (to "fix" those obsessive/compulsive, nuance-lush, needy, needy taste buds).

However, the richness of the intrigue developed from the paranormal undercurrents in this work gives more than enough sensual intrigue to provide a very successful, entertaining read, with the characters developed with a myriad of machinations to moisturize the cerebral dryness which some readers can't seem to get into in certain types of classic mystery fiction.

The escalating plot and character development in the final quarter of the book kept me flipping pages through those times when I would have normally temporarily retired my ongoing paperback and slipped into a bout of wordless day dreaming, or picked up the RC for the TV.

This was actually the first novel I had read in in the Amalfi series, and I had read it years ago (August 2002). At the time, I was contrasting a collection of culinary, recipes-included authors, seeking for more, more, more FLAVOR, and disappointed if the in-plot cooking was minimal.

Yet, as I dove into that collection, I found gems like this one, which surprised me by providing other types of reading satisfaction which worked as well or better than what I though I was craving. Still, at that time I was a definite gourmet junkie without the ambition to do any great guns cooking in my own kitchen.

At that time of culinary desperation, I noted:

"I will definitely be tempted to read another Joanne Pence mystery with Angie Amalfi; I'll be curious to see if her other offerings include more cooking details within the plot. Are Diane Mott Davidson (with her Goldy-the-Caterer series) and Phyllis Richman (WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA HAM) the only culinary authors who actually COOK, with any regular, drawn-out, sensual detail, in their books?"

I plan to reread this book, in sequence with the rest of the series, to refresh my memory on some of these details.

In closing, I'll quote something I wrote during the time I was reading BELL, COOK, and CANDLE:

Back in Augst of 2002, I was doing a very quick shop in Wal Mart. Rushing by a stack of 3 pound coffee cans, I flashed on an ad which said something like "catch the difference."

Without a single countering thought, I grabbed the can.

As a Libra I can pro and con any choice to death. I did notice that the price was under $4, which is my demarcation for the "easily affordable in my budget" for that item. I also noticed that the brand was something legitimate and established, like FOLGERS. But mostly I noticed the phrase "catch the difference" and its uncanny connection to my recently published editorial on the spiritual-barometer-quirkiness of the elusive flavor in coffee.

With renewed hope in my heart, I grabbed the can and settled it securely onto the shiny-wire-mesh floor of the shopping basket.

The next morning I made the first pot of coffee from that can, waiting to open it just before dipping the scoops. The coffee, even in my fourth cup, was "nice & nutty." It didn't descend to bitter, sour, burned old weeds (like my coffee usually does after the first sip, sometimes before). It held its flavor. I even poured a bit of the fresh from the carafe over a remainder in the bottom of the cup, which had grown cool and been micro-waved (the flavor held!).

Houston, we have a launch! (Who could launch a culinary cozy without the caffine Energizer Bunny having a lucky foot in it.)

The surprised satisfaction expressed in the above, true coffee story is how I felt about Pence's BC&C when I finished reading it, even without its being packed to the brim with juicy culinary tidbits for me to stumble over and get my fix but miss the point altogether.

Each author has his/her own draw, and Pence has more than PLENTY!

Salute! Tipping the champaign goblet,

Linda G. Shelnutt