Baking Bad

by Kim M. Watt

Genres: Crime, Fantasy, Mystery
Pages: 290
Series: Beaufort Scales #1
Rating:

Synopsis:

A tranquil village.
A poisoned cupcake.
A murdered vicar.

A simple case - or it should be. But all clues point to the Toot Hansell Women’s Institute, and Detective Inspector Adams is about to discover there’s much more to the W.I. than bake sales and jam making.

Alice Martin, RAF Wing Commander (Ret.), and current chair of the W.I., knows the ladies of the Women’s Institute are not guilty. But she has a bigger problem. Toot Hansell has a dragonish secret, and she needs to keep the police well away from it. And she’d really rather not be arrested for murder. Again.

Meanwhile, Beaufort Scales, High Lord of the Cloverly dragons and survivor of the days of knights and dragon hunts, knows even better than Alice that the modern dragon only survives as long as no one knows they exist. But he also knows friends don’t let friends face murder inquiries alone. Beaufort fully intends to Get Involved.

This investigation is about to take on dragonish proportions. Best put the kettle on.

I really wanted to like Kim M. Watt’s Baking Bad, because the person who got it for me was super-enthusiastic, and that… might actually have been non-ideal on my part. I think if I’d read it in the right moment I’d have liked it more: it’s a bit of a cosy mystery, with a fantasy element (dragons), and it has a bunch of interesting female characters: the cop investigating the murder, the chair of the Women’s Institute who is a former RAF wing commander, and also Miriam, who is the closest with the town’s secret dragon friends.

Oh, and only the Women’s Institute know about the dragons, and most people can’t see them.

I found though that it felt a little bit too cosy, deliberately positioning itself as such, while I was kinda going… “A guy was poisoned, you’re suspected of murder, one of the suspects is in your house right now having secretly entered it despite your police guard! This is not cosy, no matter how cutely your dragon doesn’t understand cloud computing!”

Aaand it didn’t help that the motive was weak, the murderer was obvious but also silly, and some chapters felt a bit like they needed a soundtrack of Yakety Sax.

Partly wrong timing for me, admittedly, but also I wasn’t really sold on the execution, alas. I’ll try more of Watt’s work, though, because I did enjoy the characters of Alice (the chair of the W.I.) and Beaufort (the leader of the dragons) — there is stuff here that I can see myself enjoying with a different plot.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)