Death by the Dozen (A Cupcake Bakery Mystery)

Melanie Cooper and Angie DeLaura are determined to win the challenge to the chefs at this year's Scottsdale Food Festival. Taking home first prize will be great publicity for their Fairy Tale Cupcakes bakery-and beating rival Olivia Puckett will be the cherry on top.

Mel's mentor from culinary school, Vic Mazzotta-now a Food Channel celebrity chef- is one of the judges, but Mel and Angie will have to win fair and square by whipping up delicious cupcakes with a mystery ingredient.

Though the real mystery is who put Vic Mazzotta on ice, literally-when his dead body is found inside a freezer truck. Mel and Angie will need to use their best judgement to find the cold-blooded killer who iced Vic, or they may lose more than the contest-they may lose their lives...

Loved it! I seriously LOVE how this series is going! Thank you Jenn, for another great book and another epic Mel & Angie adventure! As usual, you had me guessing till the end! I loved the story and it had a death had a great style in this book! Who would have though... could kill someone... ;) Can't wait to read "Red Velvet Revenge" next! And I am hoping that Joe and Mel might be hearing wedding bells in their future!

The Help

Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step... Aibileen is a black maid in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, raising her seventeenth white child. She's always taken orders quietly, but lately it leaves her with a bitterness she can longer bite back. Her friend Minny has certainly never held her tongue, or held on to a job for very long, but now she's working for a newcomer with secrets that leave her speechless. And white socialite Skeeter has just returned from college with ambition and a degree but, to her mother's lament, no husband. Normally Skeeter would find solace in Constantine, the beloved maid who raised her, but Constantine has inexplicably disappeared. Together, these seemingly different women join to work on a project that could forever alter their destinies and the life of a small town-to write, in secret, a tell-all book about what it's really like to work as a black maid in the white homes of the South. Despite the terrible risks they will have to take, and the sometimes humorous boundaries they will have to cross, these three women unite with one intention: hope for a better day.

The Help is one of the most beautiful books I think I've ever read! If it's not yet on the reading material list for schools, it should be! This book made me feel; it made me laugh, cry, and learn how to see us as "just two people". Kathryn Stockett's, The Help is amazing, rich and heartfelt. Its a story about deep love, growing, looking past the hatred and seeing people for who they really are. This is a book I will never forget!

There are so many things I loved about the book but my favorite are these;

Skeeter is writing the stories of the maids, She gets to Faye Belle's story. "Her stories unfold like soft linen. She remembers hiding in the steamer trunk with a little white girl while Yankee soldiers stomped through the house. Twenty years ago, she held that same white girl, by then an old woman, in her arms while she died. Each proclaimed their love as best friends. Swore that death could not change this. That color mean nothing. The white woman's grandson still pays Faye Belle's rent. When she's feeling strong, Faye Belle sometimes goes over and cleans up his kitchen."

Abileen is telling Mae Mobley one of her "secret stories". "We go in her room, where we like to set. I get up in the big chair and she get up on me and smile, bounce a little. Tell me, tell me about the brown wrapping. And the present. She so excited, she squirming. She has to jump off my lap, squirm a little to get it out. Then she crawl back up. That's her favorite story cause when I tell it, she get two presents. I take the brown wrapping from my piggly wiggly grocery bag and wrap up a little something, like a peice of candy, inside. Then I use the white paper from my Cole's drug store bag and wrap another one just like it. She take it real serious, the unwrapping, letting me tell the story bout how it ain't the color a the wrapping that count, it's what we is inside. "