Book 1, 2020

[chez_jae]

Pasta, Pirates and Poison by Paula Lester

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



With a day off and nothing planned, I took the time this morning to finish reading Pasta, Pirates and Poison by Paula Lester and Lisa B Thomas. This is the first book in their "Beachside Books" magical cozy mystery series, featuring aspiring young author, Paige Murphy.

Paige has left her small hometown and moved to Italy, ostensibly to work on her novel. In the meantime, she's taken a job cleaning at a hotel, and she shares a flat with two other girls. Paige loves the seaside village, the Italian food, and the romance of it all. Everything changes, however, when her brother calls to tell her their beloved aunt is dying.

Paige flies home to Comfort Cove TX, arriving in time to say goodbye to Aunt Nora before she passes. On her death bed, Nora tells Paige to take care of her flowers and Captain MacDougall. Paige assumes Captain MacDougall is the latest in the line of cats that Nora keeps at her bookstore, Beachside Books. Once the will is read, Paige learns that her scheming cousins, twins Patty and Taffy, have inherited Nora's house, her brother Scott gets Nora's vintage Mustang, and Paige inherits Beachside Books. Not sure what to do with a barely lucrative bookstore, Paige starts cleaning it and doing inventory. She meets several people, including her aunt's friend Lucy, who runs the bakery on one side of the bookstore, and Jay, a surfer dude who owns the bike shop on the other side. There's also Neal, the shop assistant that Paige has inherited with the store, and Casper, the white cat in residence.

When Paige realizes she's going to be in Comfort Cove for the foreseeable future, she cleans out the tiny, attic apartment above the shop so she can quit staying in the guest room at her brother's house. That's when the real fun starts, as the store is broken into, people are yammering at her to sell it to them, and a mysterious book collector comes in, hounding Paige to sell him an old captain's log that Nora had in her private collection.

Paige soon learns that magic and ghosts are real, that Aunt Nora was murdered, there's a drug ring in town her brother is investigating, and oh yeah, several locals believe that a pirate's treasure of gold was hidden somewhere in the store. Life in her dull hometown is more exciting than Paige imagined!

This was a cute book, lite and humorous. Some things were easy to figure out, others, not so much. Characters would have benefited from more development, but one can assume that will happen in later books.

Favorite line: Could you be a cat lady if you only had one cat?

It was an enjoyable read, but there was nothing exceptional about it. Giving it an average rating.