Sloane inherits her mother's bookstore and an eclectic group of people from employees to book club members.

Enjoyable story. ( )

After reading more than 100 pages, I was still waiting to get to a plot. Gave up and did not finish. ( )

Readers are thrown headfirst into an imaginative mystery when they open the pages of Bonnie S. Calhoun’s debut novel, Cooking the Books. Her main character, Sloane Templeton, used to work in a Cyber Crimes Unit investigating computer forensics. She decided to give up that life when she inherited her mother’s bookstore. Now she works hard to juggle looking after her eccentric aunt and her zany customers. But the real mystery starts when Sloane starts getting cyber threats.
Things keep getting worse for Sloane as the story progresses. The threatening emails and messages on her work computers are easy to ignore. Her abusive ex-boyfriend, Trey, is not. Sloane wonders if it’s safe for her to continue dating the stunningly handsome Andreas. Aunt Verline and the bookstore manager, Fifi, contribute a lot to the story while attempting to keep Sloan out of trouble. The real uniting feature among the female characters is their lack of respect from the men in their lives. Verbal and physical abuse unites them. Sloane and her lady companions grow as the novel progresses, and they learn to look at themselves as “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139: 14).
This novel, however, is not so perfectly made. The flow at times is broken by confusing switches in character, and there are other bits that seem to make no sense, such as Sloane forgetting that she is carrying a gun (page 10). Whereas the storyline is ingenious and the characters are authentic, this reader had to stop and question lines a few times.
For a first novel, Bonnie S. Calhoun has woven an admirable tale...

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(just for me) not worth finishing, or keeping

Sloane inherits her mother's bookstore and an eclectic group of people from employees to book club members.

Enjoyable story. ( )