Cherry cheesecake murder

Joanne Fluke's mildly entertaining Cherry Cheesecake Murder: A Hannah Swenson Mystery with Recipes, the seventh entry in her cozy series set in quaint Lake Eden, Minn. (after 2005's Sugar Cookie Murder), finds our heroine up to her usual tricks: keeping her hometown happily fed with tasty cookies, chatting with her precocious niece and, of course, sleuthing. Hannah's two beaux, nerdy Norman and hunky Mike, willingly put up with her inability to choose between them, but readers are likely to weary of her by now tedious shilly-shallying. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Even the murder of its cranky director can't stop the filming of Crisis in Cherrywood or halt the snooping of Lake Eden's premier baker. Just when Hannah Swenson's decided to accept neither of the marriage proposals tendered at the end of Peach Cobbler Murder (2005)--turning down both sweet-tempered dentist Norman Rhoades and hot-blooded lawman Mike Kingston--another suitor turns up. Her old college classmate Ross Barton, now a Hollywood producer who thinks Lake Eden is just the spot to shoot his new movie, recruits Hannah's mom Delores as set designer, her younger sister Michelle as production assistant and her middle sister Andrea as an extra. He even casts Andrea's five-year-old, Tracey, to play heroine Lynne Larchmont as a child and presses Hannah's cat Moishe into service as her childhood pet. For Hannah he reserves the role of constant companion, escorting her to dinner, inviting her to view the dailies and letting her watch the filming--which gives her a front-row seat as Dean Lawrence, instructing leading man Anson Burke on how to use a prop pistol, shoots himself fatally instead. Since Mike has made it clear to Hannah that she must leave investigating to the professionals, she can't investigate, she can only snoop--much to the delight of Andrea, Norman and Lake Edenites everywhere. Fluke lavishes so much attention on the mechanics of location shooting that there's scant time for the murder, much less its solution. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.