The Christmas Cookie Killer by Livia J. Washburn

From Amazon:
Christmas comes to Weatherford, Texas, in this delicious new entry in the national bestselling series.
Yuletide is here—and retired teacher cum amateur sleuth Phyllis Newsom looks forward to finishing up this unlucky year. But she won’t be hanging up her apron just yet—because this year’s Christmas bake-off is going to be cutthroat.

Phyllis would like to think she’s entering the Christmas cookie contest for the fun of it—but that’s not exactly true. She can’t imagine anyone beating her snowflake-shaped lime sugar cookies. Then, during her annual Christmas cookie exchange, Phyllis heads over to the elderly Mrs. Simmons’s home and finds her dead, in a pile of lime sugar cookies. But with a number of names on Santa’s naughty list, this case may be a hard cookie to crumble.


My Take:
This was the first book that I have read by Livia Washburn.  Although this book can be read alone, it would be helpful to read the other books in this series first just because they are mentioned several times throughout the book. 

Although the title and the description by Amazon suggests that the killing had something to do with the annual Christmas cookie contest this is not the case. 

I had the identity of the killer figured out pretty early in the book.  I really had a hard time really caring about these characters and unlike Joanne Fluke's Hannah Swenson's mysteries the recipes in this book just hit me as so-so.  I am not sure if I will read another book in this series.  I do have a free kindle copy of one of the books in her other series and will give it a shot. 

This book wasn't horrible but I have so many wonderful series that I already read that I am not sure if I will continue one that is just so-so to me.