Summary
Kelsey McKenna is a wedding planner. Destination weddings to vacation spots like Mexico are her specialty. And if she can keep herself from strangling the mother of the bride, she’s going to give Nicole and Vince the wedding of their dreams.
When one of the bridesmaids keels over during the ceremony and dies, the mother of the bride says it is Kelsey’s job to take care of it, including cleaning up the woman’s belongings and arranging for the body. And when the sister of the bride is arrested, Mrs. Abernathy seems to think it’s Kelsey’s job to fix that, too.
A wedding planner with a limited Spanish vocabulary is not particularly well-suited for solving a murder in Mexico. But Kelsey likes Nicole and Vince. She wants to help them have a happy ending to their wedding that has not gone at all to plan. So she’ll keep appeasing Mrs. Abernathy to get to the bottom of this murder – even if it puts Kelsey herself in harm’s way.
Review
This was a fun, fast read. I liked Kelsey and Brody as a sleuthing team. They seem to have a long term relationship and that felt genuine. The fact that Brody is gay means there’s no romantic tension between the two to complicate the relationship which kept things simple on that end.
Plenty of the other relationships in the story are complicated, though! There were several good suspects and motives for the crime to keep me guessing. The mother of the bride made me crazy, and I longed for someone to put her in her place. But she works well as a plot device to keep a wedding planner investigating a murder.
The theme for this cozy – destination wedding planner – is great. It gives options for awesome settings, diverse characters, and plenty of murderous shenanigans. Book 2 is Dying on the Vine and I am adding it to my TBR list!