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Wedding planner Kelsey McKenna is happy to be in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico with the Abernathy wedding party. The bride is beautiful and things are going well as long as you don't remember that the bride's mother is a royal pain at times. Soon the wedding will be over and Kelsey will be able to hightail it back to the US and plan the next wedding on her agenda. Things couldn't look better.
The bride and groom are just about to declare their undying love for each other when one of the bridesmaids collapses. Kelsey, being the expert that she is, knows that a fainting bridesmaid in the middle of a wedding is never a good sign but she's even more upset to discover that the bridesmaid hasn't fainted. She's died. Uh, oh, not good, not good at all. Things get even worse when the police tells the wedding party and guests not to leave the country because the bridesmaid was murdered.
Now Kelsey is stuck in Mexico with the bride's family treating her as if she still works for them. The happy newlyweds are married, if not all that happy, so what more does Kelsey have to do? Not much except find a place for everyone to stay, try to calm down the very upset bride, and figure out why the police have arrested the bride's sister. The police believe that the sister is the killer and Mrs. Abernathy demands that Kelsey find the real murderer and set her daughter free. Apparently, a wedding planner's work is never done.
But there is one small good thing about being being forced to stay in Mexico. Her handsome pilot friend lives there and even though Kelsey is busy trying to solve the murder, there's always time for a little romance in this beautiful little Mexican town, and Kelsey definitely finds the time.
I love a good cozy. TERROR IN TAFFETA, by Marla Cooper, might not be one of my favorite cozies but it isn't really bad. It all depends on what you like in your stories. Romance is not one of the things I look for in a cozy. Don't give me a plot with the girl and guy staring longingly into each other's eyes, playing cute little games with each other, and don't allude to any sex scenes.
The town of San Miguel de Allende is quaint, beautiful, and very romantic and the author describes the place beautifully. I mean, it sounds really nice especially if this were a romance novel but as a cozy aficionado I didn't really care about the romance plot. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I kept saying. “Kiss, kiss, hug, hug, walk of shame, but what about the murder?” The poor sister of the bride is stuck in a Mexican jail, possibly surviving solely on cucarachas, while waiting for Kelsey to come through with her promise to find the real killer. It's tough to find the killer when you're lip-locked with a hunky pilot.
To be fair to Kelsey, she didn't want to become a murder investigator and was forced into it by the very formidable Mrs. Abernathy but it was hard to feel much sympathy for her.
Thank goodness she had the wedding photographer with her who does a little computer hacking on the side. And there is that gift that the dead bridesmaid never gave to the happy couple that gives Kelsey a lead when one is needed. Between the photographer's skills and the gift, Kelsey was able to do her job with little to no thanks to the very stubborn Mexican police.
TERROR IN TAFFETA is a good cozy. It held my interest and the Mexican town sounded lovely. The book was fun and kind of crazy in a nice way. While I'd give the romance a miss, I would read another book by Marla Cooper, especially if she concentrated on Kelsey the wedding planner/sleuth, rather than Kelsey in love.
§ Sharon Katz has been reviewing books for RTE for many years. She lives in Brooklyn.
Reviewed by Sharon Katz, May 2016
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