{"id":1906,"date":"2022-10-13T01:35:29","date_gmt":"2022-10-13T01:35:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=1906"},"modified":"2023-03-11T18:30:21","modified_gmt":"2023-03-11T18:30:21","slug":"murder-at-an-irish-bakery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=1906","title":{"rendered":"Murder at an Irish Bakery"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We don\u2019t normally review the 11th book in a series, because typically after a few titles the series needs no further introduction. But I grabbed this one from the (virtual) pile because 1. It\u2019s set in Ireland, my former home; 2. It\u2019s set in a bakery, my spiritual home; 3. Murder. The Ireland here is a thoroughly modern one, with the tale set around a baking-competition reality show. Famous cookbook author Aoife McBride is the one to beat, as the contestants vie to impress the judges with elaborate chocolate constructions, fancy layered creations, and to-die-for tea cakes, all to win twenty-thousand Euro and a boost to their baking-career ambitions. The producers throw in reality-show-required conflict, of course, but get more drama than they bargained for when a protester (\u201cSugar kills! Stop the show!\u201d) outside the studio mysteriously drops dead. His is not the last face to fall in the flour, so to speak. Garda\u00ed (police officers) Siobh\u00e1n O\u2019Sullivan and Aretta Dabiri and Siobh\u00e1n\u2019s new husband, Detective Sergeant Macdara Flannery, must solve the mystery while the cameras roll and the baking puns fly. This has more than the contestants\u2019 groan-worthy puns, though, with O\u2019Connor (No Strangers Here) giving readers a <strong>healthy balance of whodunit and bitchy competition<\/strong>, not to mention a cute relationship in still-in-the-honeymoon-phase Siobh\u00e1n and Macdara. The closing recipe for Nigella Lawson\u2019s Chocolate Guinness Cake alone is worth the book price.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We don\u2019t normally review the 11th book in a series, because typically after a few titles the series needs no further introduction. But I grabbed this one from the (virtual)&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1949,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[76,64,55,56],"class_list":["post-1906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-cozy","tag-international","tag-mystery-detective","tag-women-sleuths"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Murder...Irish_-1-400x400.jpg","featured_image_src_square":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Murder...Irish_-1-400x600.jpg","author_info":{"display_name":"Henrietta Thornton","author_link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?author=4"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1906"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1906\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}