Customer Reviews

Murder Alfresco (Sunny McCoskey Napa Valley Mysteries)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Once again, Nadia Gordon has kept me on the edge of my seat in her latest Napa Valley mystery. I am associated with a vineyard, winery and restaurant in the very very northern part of California and find the accuracy of her descriptions of the wine and food industry to be right on. Besides, her characters are alway people I'd like to meet. I can hardly wait for Sunny's next big adventure.

I enjoyed the previous 2 books and was hoping I would this one also and was not disappointed in anyway.

I enjoyed the mystery and story as well as the food and wine references. I love both food and wine and this series feeds those loves along with my obsession for reading.

As a previous reviewer noted there was less character development than the previous books but that did not detract from this story.

I was sad to finish it and even sadder to see how long I have to wait for the next book to come out.

I have really enjoyed this series and looked forward to this book, but I felt like this book got away from the things that made Sharpshooter and Death by the Glass fun. There was far less character development and far more of Sunny trying to be introspective. The plot was not plausible and there was less of the fun foodie/Napa references. Overall, not that engaging.

Fans of the genre will quickly become fans of the series--Sunny McCoskey is one of the more engaging characters in recent memory, and her travails in this book are no exception. She cooks during the day and solves mysteries at night, as usual, but with a story that's a bit darker. And race cars. And surfing. With a set-up like that, what's not to like?

This was my first Sunny McCoskey book (on Kindle), and I hope not my last. Great prose, very descriptive scenes but not overly wordy, and a good, if not great, plot and ending. Quite as good as Sue Grafton's alphabet mystery series, with the advantage for me that these are set in Northern California and I have a bit of knowledge of the area. Recommended for an entertaining and not-difficult read.

I am not normally a mystery reader, so maybe I expected too much. I bought and read this book because I live in the wine country and it sounded interesting from a radio review I heard. I was disappointed in that the references to the wine country were often inaccurate and did not tell me much that I did not know already. As an inexperienced reader of mysteries, I expected some sort of ingenious/clever ending/resolution to the story, but it was really pretty dull and not surprising.