Women and Adversity:
Book Review
Everything Bundt the Truth
By Karen C. Whalen
Murder Mystery Novelist

Everything Bundt the Truth by Karen C. Whalen is as clever of a murder mystery as the title of the book.

Protagonist Jane Marsh wants to be accepted in a private dinner club and is asked to host one. The day of the dinner Jane has an accident with her dessert and orders a bundt cake from a bakery. She wonders if that’s cheating because she didn’t make the entire dinner from scratch. Would the group reject her if they found out she bought the cake?

“I want to wow the dinner club,” she tells her friend Cheryl. “If the dinner’s perfect, maybe they won’t pay any attention to the rumors.”

Rumors? Both of Jane’s husbands died under suspicious circumstances.

To complicate matters, Jane’s housekeeper is late the day of the dinner party, and Jane worries that the woman will still be cleaning when the guests arrive. When Jane comes home from the bakery, she finds the housekeeper dead in the basement.

Of course, the police suspect Jane, and she is determined to prove she didn’t murder the housekeeper. She starts her own investigation and uncovers information that leads to several suspects and finally the real killer. The reader weighs the evidence against each suspect but probably doesn’t have a clue who the real murderer is until it is revealed at the very end.

Everything Bundt the Truth is the first in Whalen’s The Dinner Club Murder Mysteries series.

She continues her clever titles with the other books in the series: Not According to Flan, No Grater Evil, A Stewed Observation, Just What I Kneaded, Peaches and Peril and Wasted Thyme.

The seven books in Whalen’s Tow Truck Murder Mysteries features Delaney Morran, a tow truck operator who wears red stilettos as her signature, even at times when she’s out towing trucks. She finds dead bodies in cars and solves the mystery of who the killers are. Toes on the Dash, Hands on the Wheel, Eyes on the Road, Friends Come to Call, Stiletto to the Pedal, Booty in the Backseat and Fear in First Gear comprise this series.

Her most recent series is The Sea Oaks Beach murder mysteries. In the first book, Murder at Sea Oats Beach, Breanna Hart is a volunteer at an animal shelter in North Carolina. The police chief is found dead, and the suspect is Breanna’s favorite dog. She won’t stand for that accusation and decides to prove it isn’t true.

In the second book, Washed Up at Sea Oaks Beach, Breanna finds a body of a woman on the beach and sees a chocolate Lab on a surfboard. What is this situation? Breanna wants to find out and learns the woman was murdered. She has to solve this mystery.

Come meet Whalen on April 17 from 9am-1pm at Sunset Beach Market at Sunset Beach Park in Sunset Beach, NC. She will also be there on  April 24 and May 22.

On April 19 from 10am-3pm she will be at Spring Market, 5 W. Third St., Ocean Isle Beach, NC

Learn more about Whalen and get on her mailing list at www.karencwhalen.com

My ebooks available at amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com:
Honoring 23 Black Women, Recognizing 23 Notable Mothers, Saluting 23 Faithful Suffragists