readandburied | Pulp Friction by Julie Anne Lindsey (Reply)

Thanks to Winnie's new cider shop, Smythe Orchards is out of the red and folks can get their fix of the produce and other delectable products they love all year round. The locals are even booking the shop for events, including a June wedding! Winnie couldn’t be happier to see the barn filled to the rafters for the big bash—until her doting ex, Hank, is caught in a heated argument with the groom. Winnie plans to scold Hank after the party, but spots him running off instead. And when the groom turns up dead, apparently hit by the honeymoon getaway car, Hank is the main suspect. Now Hank is on the lam, and it’s up to Winnie to get to the core of the truth—before the real killer puts the squeeze on her . . .

Pulp Friction is the sequel to Julie Anne Lindsey's Apple Cider Slaying, and I'm honestly so stoked. After the murders and struggles at Christmas, Winnie has finally got her cider shop up and running! So successfully in fact that she even opens it up as a wedding venue – which turns out not to be as good for business as she hoped, because the groom gets murdered in her orchard.

I really enjoyed it! I like Winnie's relationships with her family and friends, and I'm so glad to see Dot and her menagerie being a large part of the story again. (I am a little disappointed that I guessed wrong on Chekhov's Alpaca, but I was close.) The fact that Winnie is constantly supporting and being supported by her friends and family really makes me happy, and the way that she's still learning from and about the people she's known for decades felt really realistic to me! As did her non-traditional path through higher education, because quite frankly Winnie running her own busines and trying to survive Finals week is heroic on its own. I was also quite amused by the introduction of Hank's sister as the more traditional style of "No, we're going to investigate this ourselves!" cozy investigator when Winnie was quite prepared to leave her sleuthing days behind her. The feeling of a small town where you'll know someone who knows everyone still works, although apparently I now twitch whenever a character treats NRA stickers or posters as a neutral background detail! No, I don't understand it either, I will count it as my completely unrelated gripe for this review instead of the inexplicable heteronormativity.

On that note, the potential reunion with Winnie's ex, Hank, that was set up at the end of the last book, is immediately quashed at the start of Pulp Friction, in favour of more very slow burn with the Sheriff. I found Hank exceptionally frustrating as a character, which I think I was supposed to, but also ugh. The Sheriff however has grown on me, and I'm genuinely fond of his deadpan humour and worry about Winnie. The c-plot about a reporter sniffing around with a crush on Winnie's grandmother made more sense when it became plot relevant, but otherwise I was just kinda put off by people teasing a grandmother about Some Dude who couldn't take a hint. (Again, this is probably going to end in heteronormativity, and I don't know how considering all of Granny Smythe's weaponised needlework friends are right there.)

As for the main plot: I liked the set-up a lot, and the investigation itself was interesting, but the ending and its villain monologues didn't quite hang together for me, I think because so much of it hinges on guesswork for so long, and because the motives for the initial set of crimes felt baffling to me. Plus, the way that so much of the plot depended on characters going into hiding despite it only making things worse for them swung between believable and artificially slowing down the plot, so I can't say for certain how well the pacing is going to work for anyone else. However I can say that the tension and the actual investigation were really well done; I accidentally mainlined the middle third of Pulp Friction in a couple of hours because I didn't want to put it down. Plus the narration manages to be funny and heartwarming; I'm dearly fond of Winnie, her approach to life, and her perfectly sensible reactions to things.

One thing that I will note is that I believe that Julie Anne Lindsey's other series are suspense titles, and it really shows here. The ending (and the Sheriff's backstory) is very much set up to a sequel, and tonally it feels much more like a thriller than it does a cozy mystery. This isn't bad! I found it very effective, especially for the way tension builds, I just hadn't expected "cozy" and "suspense" to go together quite this well.

The long and the short of it is that I really enjoyed Pulp Friction, it was a fun sequel to a book that I really liked, and now I'm desperately shaking Goodreads to try to make the third book come out faster.

[This review is based on an ARC from Netgalley.]