Christmas Cupcake Murder

 

I think this is the last time I'm going to waste my time reading one of these Hannah Swenson books. The last few have just been so terrible. Even though they're a quick read (especially if you skip the pages of recipes), I still feel like they're a total waste of time. It's a shame, the first dozen or so were pretty good.

This one supposedly takes place in the beginning, before Hannah solved her first mystery, yet Mike and Norman are both good friends, which didn't happen right away in the beginning of the books. The timeline was just all over the place. If you cut out all the bits about Hannah thinking about what to bake, baking it, describing how she baked it to 16 different people, then had all 16 different people try whatever she had baked and describe how much they liked it, the book would have been about 20 pages long. There was one ridiculous scene where her cat, Moishe, woke her up in the middle of the night by knocking over things in the pantry, then she had to describe exactly what happened to Mike and Norman over breakfast the next day. I'm like...uh...I just *read* what happened, you don't need to rehash it two pages later. I haven't gotten that senile just yet. 

The mystery was a man named Joe who had amnesia and Hannah helped him remember who he was. It was silly.

Oh, TEAM NORMAN!! Seriously, Norman deserves so much better than to be trapped in these dull books with this dull girl who doesn't realize how wonderful he is. We need to rescue Norman.