Pink Lemonade Murder by Joanne Fluke

Available July 25, 2023

Rating: 3 lemonades

Lake Eden is hosting a baseball tournament, complete with a local boy who did a short stint in the major leagues before coming home under a cloud of disgrace. The town has rolled out the red carpet for the teams and their guests, but No-No has muddied the length of it and angered many. When No-No turns up dead it's anyone's guess who'd finally had enough.

I read the first 20-ish books of this series and then took a break for a while, picking back up with the last book. Overall, I've been very disappointed with the direction the series has taken. I thoroughly enjoyed the first dozen or so books in the series, reading them one after another. Hannah was a fun character who had the ear of everyone in town and the hearts of most. Lisa was the perfect business partner, young and energetic and supportive of Hannah's curiosities when it came to local crime. I didn't even find the Mike and Norman debate off-putting for a very long time. Both are good guys and it's easy to see how a woman would have trouble deciding between the two.

Somewhere along the line things changed. I suspect there have been multiple ghost writers involved. I think someone else took over the writing of this series around book 16 or 17, and then after a few books (maybe 2-4, around book 18 or 19) another ghost writer took over. Unfortunately the series just lost something along the way. It feels like the writer is just not sure what to do with the stories anymore so the pages are filled with things like observations of door knocking patterns in every other chapter (each accompanied by a lecture about looking through the peephole before opening the door), people telling people things they already know (Hannah took the time to explain to Norman who Ross was as though Norman could have missed the fact that Hannah had gotten married), Delores questioning how Hannah knows it's her when she calls on her cell phone. And the recipes have lost something too. Many of them involve cake mixes! A baker wouldn't use cake mixes. There are also so many recipes. Early in the series there might be half a dozen recipes, in this book there are 28 recipes for everything from meatloaves to martinis.

Fluke has written some really fun books and created a world that many people know and love so I want to give her the credit she is due, but this book was not up to her standards.

Thank you to the author, the publisher, and to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC.