BOOKS & STUFF

Tom is busy building a “bridge” so we can get from the driveway into our walk-out basement door. The snow is piled high on both sides, so when it melts it puddles in front of the cement stoop there. It won’t get inside, but it makes getting in and out a pain. Ah, spring. We really want it, but we still have to deal with the side effects.

As a person who doesn’t drink coffee and loves chocolate — especially if it is the dark kind — I was immediately drawn to an e-book with the title “Death By Chocolate.” It turned out to be a pretty good mystery by Sally Berneathy.

Lindsay Kramer is three weeks away from a final divorce decree, but her soon-to-be ex-husband Rick keeps popping up. As the story progresses, Rick’s attempts to win Lindsey back and his ridiculous jealousy offer great comic relief.

Lindsey packed up and left when she came home from work early and found Rick in bed with Muffy or Buffy or whatever. It didn’t take her long to figure out that this wasn’t Rick’s first or only affair.

When they split up assets, she took two of their rental properties and little else. She lives in one and rents the other to Paula Walters, a young single mom, and her toddler son, Zach.

Paula had no references, no furniture and offered no personal information. Intuition told Lindsey that Paula was escaping an abusive situation. It didn’t take long for the two to become good friends. That friendship grew into a partnership without paperwork when Paula helped turn Lindsey’s chocolate shop into a thriving restaurant/bakery.

One afternoon, a large gray cat shows up at Lindsey’s and quickly shows his dislike for Rick and his abilities as a “watch cat.” When officers Creighton and Trent show up at Paula’s asking if she knows a man named Lester Mackey, Paula is terrified but insists that she doesn’t know the man. From then on things get more and more frightening.

Eventually Paula confides that she was married to a police officer who, like his father, was mentally and physically abusive. She finally took Zach and left him, but he tracked her down. They fought and he was shot. Paula called 911, then fled with Zach before ending up at Lindsey’s rental.

Now it appears that her late husband’s father, Lester Bennett, has found her and is secretly doing things to make Paula look like an unfit mother and worse. Lindsey is determined to find out who is behind all the trouble and enlists the help of her other neighbor Fred.

Fred is a computer genius, a bit reclusive and obsessively neat. But he is more than willing to help once he learns Paula’s real story. Things turn deadly when Lindsey eats a poisoned chocolate dessert. The only thing that saves her is the fact that she eats too much and it makes her sick. Now she and Fred redouble their efforts to find out who is after Paula.

As they peel back the layers of deceit, they learn that Paula’s husband is very much alive and he’s here to get Zach. Part of his plan is to convince the authorities that Paula is mentally unstable so that she’ll be institutionalized the rest of her life.

But David Bennett hasn’t planned for the determination of Lindsay, Fred’s hidden talents and the anger of a big cat she calls King Henry. As expected, things work out in the end, and Lindsey just might have a chance at a relationship more in sync with her love of chocolate.

Real friendships are hard to come by, but we can imagine what it would be like to have friends like the ones we read about. Stop at your public library where you can see what I mean by checking it out.

AT A GLANCE
BOOK: “Death By Chocolate”
AUTHOR: Sally Berneathy
PUBLISHER: Amazon Digital Services LLC
PUBLISHED: Feb. 1, 2011
PAGES: 307