Review: Mulled Murder (Pennyfoot Hotel Mysteries #21) by Kate Kingsbury

Mulled Murder (Pennyfoot Hotel Mysteries #21) by Kate Kingsbury

Published October 29th 2013 by Berkeley

Paperback, 304 pages

Series: Pennyfoot Hotel Mysteries

Genre: Cozy Mystery

Source:  I got a copy of this book from the publisher  in exchange of an honest review.
Amazon | Goodreads

Summary from Goodreads

This holiday season at the Pennyfoot, the head count is down—but the body count is up…

With one of her housemaids leaving to get married, Cecily Sinclair Baxter wants nothing more for Christmas than some good help. Instead of visions of sugar plums, she’s calling the plumber to deal with flooded bathrooms. Then there’s the surly new janitor, who acts like he got coal in his stocking.

But as Cecily scrambles to hire and train new staff in time for the holidays, one of her guests is beyond help. Gerald Evans is found stabbed to death on the beach, and Cecily soon discovers he was a private investigator from London looking into dark doings involving the Pennyfoot. Who among the staff or guests was being pursued, and what secret drove that person to cold-blooded murder?

Murder strikes again close to home as holiday season draws near at Pennyfoot. It's bad enough that Cecily Sinclair Baxter has to deal with loosing one of her housemaids as she is leaving to get married, but the new additions and guests at Pennyfoot leave her plenty to be curious about. When the first dead body turns up a little too close to the country club, there is talks once again that Pennyfoot might be cursed. The last thing Cecily wants is for this to be revealed to everyone else with Christmas around the corner.

I picked this one up hoping to get my Christmas reading fix. I know, I know, it's not even Thanksgiving yet and I am already craving all those warm holiday stories. I have to say, this did not deliver as much as I wanted it to. Christmas, or holiday season was mentioned in passing. There was a lot going on in this book, not only with murder, but with guests and the downstairs staff, and upstairs. I felt the story branched out a couple of times and although it was easy to follow, everything just out of no where fell together in the last few chapters of the book. Things that I wouldn't have found related, just suddenly where related.

The murder I felt also took kind of a back seat in this one as well. Most of the focus seemed to be on Pansy, Lilly and the new girl Alice. Although Cecily was investigating the murder, she only appeared ever so often and sometimes left me in question how she entered the conclusion about what's going on, cause it left me scratching my head with the lack of investigating going on.

I did like the book, the characters were interesting, the writing was very nice. Kingsbury can tell a story well. I was a bit disappointed about how the murder and the wedding where also mentioned in passing in the end, but it was still a pleasant read!