How to Cook a Tart By Nina Killham

This book is classified as a mystery by my public library. It has been mislabeled. The only mystery is how it got published. The book starts out with Jasmine finding a body on her kitchen floor. It is the very first paragraph in the book. We don’t get back to it until the last chapter.
How to Cook a Tart seems to be a parody of both the romance novel and the modern push to eat healthy. The author, Nina Killham, is an excellent writer. She paints pictures with her words that are vivid and easy to see in the readers mind. The problem is that one can only take so many pictures of someone stuffing food into their mouth. This book is 250 pages of Jasmine, the heroine, obsessing about or shoveling food into her fat face, her husband obsessing about the affair that he has been driven to by his upcoming fortieth birthday, and her daughter’s obsession with losing her virginity.
Reading this book was like listening to the same joke over and over again. While it is funny the first time, by the third or fourth chapter the variations of the joke have gotten old. Long before I hit the half way mark of this book I was only skimming, looking for the mystery. The characters by this point had become grotesque instead of amusing or even interesting.