Charred: A Whipped and Sipped Mystery – a Review

Alene Baron, a vegan, owns and runs the Whipped and Sipped Café. Her cookies and confections are known all over Chicago. The coronavirus pandemic has changed things for everyone. Her business has suffered because of it and her employees are frustrated. A café once filled with customers has turned into one that mostly handles take-out orders. On top of that, there’s this homeless man who hangs around outside of her café bothering her customers who still visit for the yummy treats they can get there.

Now everyone must be masked and keep six feet apart. Kids are being schooled at home by their parents and over a computer, not at school. That’s not such a big deal for those who are used to homeschooling, but for those who aren’t, well, it’s not so easy to all at once be your kids’ teacher as Alene is discovering with her three children.

Someone is burning buildings under construction. Life is already difficult enough, but then murder arrives on the scene. In the burned rubble from buildings owned by the husband of Alene’s pastry chef, Ruthie, two bodies are discovered. On the corpses are jackets that once belonged to Ruthie, and in the pockets are wrappers from the Whipped and Sipped Café.

Meanwhile, it is discovered that the basement of the Whipped and Sipped Café used to be a speakeasy, a place where alcohol was illegally sold during the Prohibition, and Alene’s uncle, a convicted felon who hasn’t been seen for twenty-two years, resurfaces and wants a chance to explain things to Alene’s dad, his brother.

There is a very helpful cast of characters in the front of the book, and this book has a lot of characters. If you’re anything like me and have trouble keeping up with who is who, you’ll probably want to refer to this often while you’re reading.

Chocolate Babka, Flickr

As a treat, in the back of the book after the end of the story are some recipes for items sold at the Whipped and Sipped Café. They even sound good to me, especially the Peanut Butter Banana Bread and the Chocolate Babka.

Once I started reading Charred: a Whipped and Sipped Mystery I found it difficult to put down. I became involved in the characters’ lives and what was going on with them. And I was trying to figure out the answers to some questions, questions that Alene also wanted the answers to, and she came close to losing her life while finding them out: Who killed the two found in the rubble of the burned buildings? What did Uncle Finn want to explain? And what was up with Peter, the guy who hung around outside the Whipped and Sipped Café harassing Alene’s customers?

Virtual Book Tours sent me a copy of this book to read in exchange for an honest review. If you would like to read this book, I’ve provided an Amazon link for it below as well as links for the first two books in the series.

Amazon Links:

Battered: A Whipped and Sipped Mystery

Smothered: A Whipped and Sipped Mystery

Charred: A Whipped and Sipped Mystery

Recommended Article: Speakeasies and other Illegal Activities in Chicago – Guest Post by G.P. Gottlieb

Favorite Sentences:

If paper masks didn’t protect against an airborne particulates, how could they protect against an ongoing virus?

She’d always spoken softly, but the mask, in addition to fogging up her glasses, made her almost impossible to understand.

With his disapproving expression and blinking, reptilian eyes, he reminded her of a vampire, and she recalled that you’re never supposed to invite them in because afterwards, they can enter freely, anytime.

But what if the only cure was for the schools to open back up and everything to back to normal?

Had anyone appreciated how free they were to enjoy themselves back then?

New Words Learned:

babka – a sweet, spongy yeast cake with raisins, traditionally made in the form of a high cylinder, either solid or with a hole, often glazed, and sometimes flavored with rum

Krav Maga – a form of exercise based on unarmed combat movements developed by the Israeli armed forces

myasthenia gravis – a disease of impaired transmission of motor nerve impulses, characterized by episodic muscle weakness and easy fatigability, especially of the face, tongue, neck, and respiratory muscles: caused by autoimmune destruction of acetylcholine receptors. Abbreviation: MG

nattered – talked incessantly, chattered

nebulous – hazy, vague, indistinct, or confused

perfunctory – performed merely as a routine duty; hasty and superficial

speakeasya saloon or nightclub selling alcoholic beverages illegally, especially during Prohibition

About the Author:

Known for her imaginative baking and fabulous dinners, G.P. Gottlieb was always an avid reader. She enjoyed several careers, but after recovering from cancer, turned to writing in earnest, melding two passions: nourishment for mind and body, and recipe-laced murder mysteries. She is also the host for New Books in Literature, a podcast of the New Books Network.

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