dahlias delight

My Review

Well, well, well. What a surprise. Not being familiar with Karen Tjebben’s work, I thought Dahlia’s Delights was a cozy. I even made some notes that it had quite a few of what I now call your “every day cozy pieces”.  A handsome cop, a thwarted female returning to her small coastal hometown, taking over or inheriting the family business, etc. Sounds like a cozy doesn’t it? I’m not making fun of them. I like them…easy and quick to read, always a little mystery, not too much violence. Well it was cozy, let me tell you. Really cozy between the baker and the cop.

I am making fun of my own naivete about Dahlia’s Delights. It was rather nice to have a detour from other stories…to have someone trying to ruin a business for a change instead of killing the owner. No dead bodies here. Not even an amateur sleuth. However, there is a certain amount of sexual content here, and I suppose it seemed even more explicit to me because I didn’t expect it. Romance, especially somewhat erotic romance are not my choice of genre. Although a surprise, this did not contain enough of either to ruin the read for me. While Dahlia might be a good baker and a delight to her old crush Mark, now a cop in little Avenel, she was also a delight as a character. All the important characters in Tjebben’s book were well-defined; easy to picture. 

This is Book 2 of a series titled “The Flowers of Avenel”. Karen Tjebbin has several other books published. All look to be of the romance genre and all have good reviews.