In this new cozy mystery, Helen Dexter's Seaview Hotel in Scarborough can add four stars to it's name. That is, when the earned our stars sign someday will be installed at the outside wall of the hotel. The four stars are the result of years of hard work, together with her prize winning chef cook Jean. And the four stars are a thorne in the eye of the competing hotel across the street, The Vista del Mar hotel from her rival Miriam. Helen also has a charming and sweet little dog, Suki, and an on and off relationship with an Elvis impersonator. And she is turning 50 soon, something she is not looking forward to that much.
Things take a crazy turn at the hotel when a large team taking part in a local golf tournament arrives a the hotel for a longer stay. It is quite an eccentric group, with quite some demanding people in it. The worst of them is the star of the golf team, a snobby man named Ricky Delmont, who thinks he is so important that he lets Helen sign a NDA agreement, so no one ever will know the secret of his diet that makes him win, which is a diet that rules out any form of peanuts, full of and as an ingredient of course, as he has a severe allergy. Helen and Jean have their hands full of all the crazy demands of the golf team, which reaches its peak at the day of the big golf tournament. Everything seems to go smooth before the tournament, it is a huge event with food and ice cream trucks, and the golf team is ready for it. But then when the tournament is about to start, Ricky D Delmont walks into the game, grabbing his throat in agony, it seems he has trouble breathing, and falls down dead at the feet of Helen's boyfriend.
The tourmanent is stopped immediately, and the big question is ofcourse; what happened to Ricky Delmont? He wasn't a very nice guy, but his dead is suspicious. The police are investigating what happened, but ofcourse Helen is too. Things take a turn for the worse when her chef Jean walks out to the competing hotel across the street, Helen is short staffed without the help of a cook and a cleaner, and when it seems that when she was away working, someone has been into Helen's private apartment.. and meanwhile, finding the missing pieces of the puzzle who killed Ricky Delmont is anything but peanuts...
This was the very first time I've read a Helen Dexter Mystery novel, and it pleasantly surprisided me! I found it a very entertaining story, if you mix Jessica Fletcher with Fawlty Towers, I think you get a thrilling, page turning, funny detective story like this. The characters and the storyline are absolutely brilliant. Helen is a kind but very strong main character, someone who has to run the whole hotel by herself mostly, but she does it so well with the help of Jean, who has her snarky, grumpy moments, and even when she does walk away after a fall out with Helen about the four stars, she returns and shows that she is a true friend after all. The crazy group of golfers, what a comical cast of characters it is with all their own strong personalities. Somehow I potrayed Ricky Delmont as a Gaston from Beauty and the Beast type of man because he was quite full of himself and very arrogant mostly. And the revealing of the murderer of Ricky? Well that was quite a plot twist I didn't expect and truly not who I suspected. It truly made it a cliffhanger kind of ending, but with a good story wrap up in the end.
This is a very entertaining, exciting ,thrilling and also very funny new book in the Helen Dexter series, I recommend it!!
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