Soft Serve Sleighing

Coffee & Cream Café Mystery, #5

by

Lena Gregory

When a blackmailing TikToker meets an untimely demise in the snow, Dani Delaney is unexpectedly involved in another murder investigation.

Soft Serve Sleighing is the fifth fun entry in author Lena Gregory’s outstanding, cozy Coffee & Cream Café Mysteries, and, once again, Dani Delaney finds herself in the middle of a murder investigation. With its comfortable, familiar Long Island setting and its likable recurring cast of characters, I was quickly drawn into the latest story of murder and intrigue in the little town of Watchogue. 

Dani is the series’s main character and the owner and operator of the local ice cream and coffee café, having taken the business over from her Uncle Jimmie. Now, in the dead of winter, the addition of coffee and pastries to the former “ice cream only” parlor’s offerings is starting to pay off with a clientele of regulars from the local population when a blizzard hits the town and shuts everything down. When three young women appear at the closed café, Dani feels obligated to open up just for them, even after their leader, Brynleigh Star, a TikTok influencer, unjustly bashes the local B&B where they are staying. The three proceed to order numerous items from the menu and demand tastes of all the specialty ice cream dishes, then insinuate they’ll only post a 5-star review of the café if Dani subscribes to one of their outrageously expensive memberships. When Dani fails to take the bait, they walk their check. The next day, when Dani finds the instigator dead in the snow near the B&B on the town’s favorite hill for sledding, she begins to look like suspect number one! 

The plot progresses swiftly from setup to the discovery of the murder, and I didn’t want to put the book down at all as the fun amateurs followed their instincts. I appreciated how Dani has to walk a fine line between definitively clearing her name and staying on the right side of her police detective boyfriend, Jake Barlow, who wants her as far away from the case as possible. However, it was fun watching Dani, Gwen, and Eli dance around the rules and work through the clues they had, many of which had fallen into their laps via some other very talkative suspects. After four previous books in this fun series, I really felt like I knew these characters. There are some good suspects, with everyone having a bone to pick with the very unlikable victim, but the truth isn’t too obvious. It was an entertaining story all the way to the final reveal. 

I recommend SOFT SERVE SLEIGHING to cozy mystery readers, especially fans of the previous books in the series. 

I voluntarily reviewed this after receiving an Advanced Review Copy from the author through Great Escapes Virtual Book Tours.