Frappe Today Dead Tomorrow

When Emma moved to a small town and opened a coffee shop and used book store she thought that life was going great for her. A steady stream of customers and local businesses were making her dreams come true. Small towns hold big secrets though and not everything or everyone is what they seem. When Emma finds one of her more mysterious customers known to her only by the nickname “Lion” badly injured, Emma is thrown into a world where the supernatural might be the only thing natural about her new home.

I received this book for free from Review Copy in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Frappe Today Dead Tomorrow is the definition of a ‘cozy mystery’.  It has a crime, in this case an assault that puts a young woman in a coma, the hero who isn’t an investigator but is thrown into the role, and a villain with shady plans, and little on screen violence.

I will say this had a nice twist to it, in that Star, the girl in the coma, joins the investigation in a supernatural way by being able to communicate with Emma, the main character, and minimally affect the world around her.  It is sort of like a ghost side kick, with the exception that the person isn’t actually dead.  There is a lot of supernatural/metaphysical stuff in this book that I did not expect when I first started reading it.  Not that it’s a bad thing.  The subject is generally well handled and while a bit to new-age for my tastes, it didn’t beat me over the head.  The overall story and mystery are pretty well done and hit the notes you would want from this kind of book.

From a plot perspective, this is a really solid read.

Sadly, there technical details let the plotting down quite a bit.  This book is badly in need of an editor.  There are mountains of grammatical and structural errors with this book that makes it very hard to get through.  Besides the technical details, there are other small things an editor would have caught, like repetitive word usage and mistaken word substitution (your for you’re and the like).

I also had some issues with the pacing, but it’s hard to judge how badly this hurt the book, since the flow of reading was already broken by the technical problems.  There are many places where the book slows down to navel gaze, with conversations that seem to drag on yet have little to do with moving the story or the plot forward. This again might have been helped by a good editor, who could have suggested pulling some of the extra padding off the book and streamlining the story.

I honestly believe that if Leah got a solid editor to help her out, she could be a great writer.  The idea behind the book was straightforward yet with enough twists and innovation to keep it interesting. But, as a stand-alone work, this book is nearly impossible to get through.

Review by Travis Starnes

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