Cake on a Hot Tin Roof
Piece of Cake # 2
Jacklyn Brady

Berkley Prime Crime
Feb 2012/ ISBN: 978-0-425-24622-1
Mystery/Cozy/Amateur Sleuth
Amazon

Reviewed by Laura Hinds

New Orleans is always a hotbed of activity. It's even hotter in the Zydeco Cakes bakery, where new owner Rita Lucero, a pastry chef, is hard at work trying to meet the demands for king cakes. Rita inherited the business from her almost-ex-husband just a few short months before. Keeping the business running and above water is her first priority.

However, when local businessman Big Daddy Boudreaux ends up swimming with the fishes (or at least dead in the water in the swimming pool), Rita has to find evidence that her Uncle Nestor isn't the killer. Nestor had an argument with Big Daddy and socked him in the jaw earlier during a Mardi-Gras party, but Rita knows her uncle isn't a killer. So now it's up to the pastry chef to sift through the clues to help the truth rise to the surface.

I loved the first book in this series , and I'm thrilled that this sequel didn't disappoint me. I still love Rita's courage and good instincts, and I will continue to root for Rita in future installments.

The New Orleans setting keeps the book lively, and I loved the rich details and ambiance the author conveys. With the perfect recipe for an intriguing murder mystery, Jacklyn Brady has mixed up the perfect concoction of suspects, motives, means and opportunity. True to real-life characters and situations which could be ripped from the headlines of any major city news outlet make Cake on a Hot Tin Roof a sequel that fans of this series will not want to miss!

Reviews of other titles in this series

A Sheetcake Named Desire #1
Cake on a Hot Tin Roof #2
Arsenic and Old Cake #3
The Cakes of Wrath #4
Rebel Without a Cake #5
The Cakes of Monte Cristo #6