Book #37: Lemon Tart (Whitney Book 17)

Title: Lemon Tart
Author: Josi S. Kilpack

Well folks, I'm over the hump. Book 16 marks the official beginning of the second half of the Whitney nominees, although with three big ones in the second half (Sanderson, Brown, and Lund's 800+-page tome), I doubt I've made it to the halfway mark in terms of total pages. But two whole books today-- not too shabby!

Lemon Tart is the story of Sadie Hoffmiller, a good-hearted neighborhood busybody, who looks up one morning while canning applesauce to see two police cruisers rushing into her cul-de-sac. Her neighbor, Anne Lemmon, is dead in a field behind her house, and no one knows where her two-year-old has gone. Sadie, who has spent her life teaching school, baking for her neighbors, and volunteering on nearly every committee and for every social project in her small Colorado town, can't just sit by and continue canning, she needs to find a killer. Soon she realizes that the story of Anne's life and death are much closer to her own than their relationship as neighbors.

When my mom saw this book on my desk a few days ago, she asked if I was done reading it yet so she could take it and read it on her flight home. Although I had to turn her down, I think I'm going to stick it in the mail and send it her way, because I know she'd love it. I know that culinary mysteries are sort of a hot thing right now, and I think Kilpack does a good job with hers; it seems like a book that could definitely hold its own with other culinary cozies that aren't geared for an LDS audience.

The LDS audience thing is actually the only thing that really troubled me about the book. Kilpack never says that Hoffmiller and her family are LDS, although she talks about church in passing quite frequently. In fact, there are several details that make me think that she doesn't want her characters to be LDS-- namely her reference to Jack's (Sadie's brother) pastor, and to the Jesus fish on the back of his wife's car (how many Mormons do you know with a Jesus fish?). So Kilpack seems to want to define her character as generically Christian. But as someone who is now Mormon but used to be generically Christian, I think Kilpack gets some things wrong. For one thing, she talks about how Jack broke covenants when he cheated on his wife, which screams Mormon to me. She also talks about drinking herbal tea several times, and any non-Mormon would simply refer to the beverage as tea. When Sadie sneaks into her fiance's house, she's surprised to see that he wears briefs instead of boxers. It seems highly improbable that two widowed fifty-somethings who had been together for eighteen months wouldn't know something like that about each other, unless they were abstaining Mormons. So I see Sadie as very Mormon, even if she doesn't realize it. Maybe she's a Dry Mormon, and she'll have a spiritual awakening in English Trifle, where she'll realize that she's been living as a Mormon all along, and she should just make it official.