Murder with Chocolate Tea (Daisy's Tea Garden Mystery, #10)

by Karen Rose Smith

Tea shop owner and bride-to-be Daisy Swanson must solve a murder before she can say “I do” in the latest Daisy’s Tea Garden Mystery set in Pennsylvania’s Amish country…

Daisy has a lot to celebrate this summer. She’s supervising a special tea event to help commemorate the 100-year-anniversary of her town’s historic covered bridge. But the main event is her upcoming wedding to her beloved fiancé Jonas. Somehow Willow Creek’s busiest brewer of specialty teas and amateur sleuth still finds time to be a guest on local journalist Trevor Lundquist’s crime podcast to discuss the last murder she solved.

After the podcast, Trevor receives an anonymous tip from a caller who claims a travel chest that’s about to be auctioned holds a clue to a twenty-year-old unsolved murder. Is it a hoax or a genuine lead? When a body turns up in Willow Creek, Trevor suspects a connection between this current homicide and the cold case. Has the murderer killed again to cover their tracks? Now Daisy has another mystery steeping and Trevor may just have his next podcast . . .

• ISBN10: 1496738489
• ISBN13: 9781496738486
• Publish Date: 28 November 2023
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Kensington Publishing
• Format: Paperback (US Mass Market)
• Pages: 320
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/isbn/9781496738486

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally posted on my blog Nonstop Reader.

Murder with Chocolate Tea is an engaging shopfront cozy and the 10th book featuring Daisy Swanson and her friends and family by Karen Rose Smith. Released 28th Nov 2023 by Kensington, it's 320 pages and is available in mass market paperback, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout. For Kindle Unlimited subscribers, this book is currently included in the KU subscription library to borrow and read for free. The other books in the series are also currently available on KU.

This is a well-established and long running series with characters who have developed over the series run and are believable and well rendered. Despite that, the mystery is self-contained in this volume and it works quite well as a standalone, with the understanding that the interrelationships have developed and reading them out of order could spoil some developments (but nothing game breaking).

Daisy is busy preparing for her upcoming nuptials, guest interviewing on a true-crime podcast about her previous "cases", running the tea shop, and preparing for an upcoming centenary celebration for a local landmark, when an anonymous tip to a clue about a long ago cold case draws her into another mystery.

This is a fun small town shopfront cozy series. It's full of slightly eccentric characters, clean language, and off page violence. 

Four stars. It would make a good binge or buddy read. Light and entertaining.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.