Feliz Navidead

A Santa Fe Café Mystery

By: Ann Myers

Narrated by: Cris Dukehart

Length: 8 hrs and 40 mins

Publisher's summary

Holly, jolly, and downright deadly - the third Santa Fe Café mystery unwraps surprises both naughty and nice.

It's the most picturesque time of the year in Santa Fe, and Chef Rita Lafitte of Tres Amigas Café hopes the twinkling lights and tasty holiday treats will charm her visiting mom. Rita is also planning fun activities, such as watching her teenage daughter, Celia, perform in an outdoor Christmas play.

What she doesn't plan for is murder. Rita discovers a dead actor during the premier performance, but vows to keep clear of the case. Sleuthing would upset her mom. Besides, there's already a prime suspect, caught red-handed in his bloodied Santa suit. However, when the accused Santa's wife begs for assistance - and points out that Celia and other performers could be in danger - Rita can't say no. With the help of her elderly boss, Flori, and her coterie of rogue knitters, Rita strives to salvage her mother's vacation, unmask a murderer, and stop this festive season from turning even more fatal.

©2016 Ann Perramond (P)2016 HarperCollins Publishers

Fluffy and Fun

This is another light and fun cozy mystery. The characters are entertaining and the mystery is well written and light.

Ok read

This series is good it got better as I listen to them. Still love the narrator. She needs the main character not so scared.

Most irritating cozy heroine of all time?

The mysteries in this series are adequate. Most of main characters however, are intolerable.

The heroine is not only TSTL, but she's a grown-a** woman and she's afraid to have her mother know: the reason for her divorce (philandering husband), that she has 3 corkscrews, that she might drink a margarita, that she is dating a man... The whole book is filled with extraordinarily high levels of angst and worry that her mom will not enjoy the "culture" of Santa Fe, or be offended by the foods people in another state consume. It was a level of terror of her mother that might appropriately result from a Mommie Dearest.

However, this Mommie Dearest was just a generic disapproving midwestern libraria, horrified by aspects of everyday life in another part of the U.S. and suffering from terror of crazy foreign spices like chile powder. She also tries to fix up her daughter with a dentist from their hometown. Over and over, in dialogue that would be more appropriate to a 1920s period piece. I am not sure if this author is 150 years old and this is how she believes people talk, or if she really distains the Midwest and is trying to mock the heck out of people from that region by making them so over-the-top backward. It's one or the other.

As I said, the mystery is OK, but it's entirely, totally ruined by the heroine, who not only didn't improve from the first book but seems to have gotten exponentially dumber and less likable.

She's a cook and waits tables but regularly spills on people. She can't organize her belongings. She takes people out to visit a donkey that she knows can't have treats and are escape artists, and holds a gate open for it to take off. She calls 911 and engages in an ridiculously unhelpful report to the operator where the similarity of the words Santa and Satan is featured as some kind of pathetic meant-to-be-funny schtick. She asks to see some archeological artifacts that SHE KNOWS ARE BONES and then is repeatedly "repulsed" by the bones. And then wants to go back to see the repulsive bones.

The secondary characters are better but still just shallow collections of stereotpyes on paper. The mystery is OK. But you'll spend the book hoping Santa/Satan takes the heroine as his/her next victim.