Review: Too much detail; too little plot.  Boring
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 01 6, 2014
At age fifty; Samantha Sweet’s dream was to own a bakery featuring cakes, cookies, and cupcakes.  Currently, she was doing her baking at home under less than ideal conditions.  Until she saved enough money to accomplish that she worked part time for a government agency cleaning and maintaining homes that had gone into default.  Her job was to get them into shape to be sold.One day, she found a very ill, very unusual woman lying in bed in one of the houses.  The woman gave Sam a box which she said had special powers, then she died.  When she was mowing the yard at the next house, she discovered an unidentified grave.  Both those finds play major roles in SWEET MASTERPIECE.Her new powers give her more energy and the ability to see things others cannot.  The body in the grave is that of a recluse, an elderly man who turned out to have been a famous painter.  The sheriff’s department initially believes he may have died from pneumonia or another natural cause.While the book was a fast read and well-written, I found the plot to be very thin.  There were some very good descriptions of various locations.  It had a lot of filler material about making cakes and cupcakes (no recipes were provided) and an overview, repeated several times, of what Sam did to prepare a house.The book has a lot of characters, primarily some of Sam’s long-time friends.  She talks about her daughter Kelly who cleaned out Sam’s savings.  Later the daughter returns but the story doesn’t give enough details about why she quit her job or why she suddenly changed.Another main character is the sheriff, Beau Cardwell.  The relationship between him and Sam moves too quickly without explanation of Beau’s motivation.Overall, I found the book to be boring because of all the surface attention given to Sam’s jobs. It might have made a better short story.This book was a free Amazon download.