I sort of have a love/hate relationship with cozy mysteries. I usually don't care about who died or who's trying to solve the mystery but I do tend to like the small-town setting with often quirky side characters. This had all of that but it also had an OVERWHELMING amount of food talk. I like foodie cozy mysteries too but this one took every opportunity to educate the reader about filipino food and at some point I didn't care about the color and consistency of coconut jam, I just wanted to know who did it.

The author also added a content warning at the beginning of the book for being set up by the police and fat shaming. I understand why she added the content warning for the framing plot device - the book as she wrote it doesn't work without it - but my position with a fat shaming content warning is: you wrote the book. You could have just as easily NOT included the fat shaming instead of including it and then warning readers. But also, admittedly I'm not a close reader, but no one is described as being fat. Lila talks about having pudge. The victim dies and everyone says it must have been his diabetes but he's not described as fat either. Obviously you can have diabetes without being fat and vice versa but in addition to being grossed out at the way everyone assumed the diabetic must have died because he ate dessert, I was still trying to figure out who the fat shaming warning was for when no one in the book was fat? Was it really diabetes shaming that the author was flagging? I spent more time thinking about this than who killed Derek.