Fromage, Sally Scott

I have no idea how this happens, but here I was, reading FROMAGE by Sally Scott, and I suddenly realised... shoes again. Another heroine on the "slightly ditzy side" that's obsessed with shoes. It's so not my comfort zone, although I was looking for something on the lighter, silly side, and, well mission accomplished, aside from the multiple deaths and the constant threat from lurking blokes.

As the blurb puts it, Alex Grant is enjoying the last eating / lying on the beach / doing nothing days of her Croatian summer holiday when she runs into old school friend Marie Puharich, and her brother Brian, home from Australia to attend the funeral of their grandfather's two loyal retainers. Brian, it seems, has always had a romantic interest in Alex (to say nothing of her family connections - what with her father being a well known figure in the legal world), but she's having none of it, finding him more than a bit on the creepy, slimy side. On the other hand, family adonis, and Brian and Marie's cousin, Marco could be another story altogether.

Fast-forward to Western Australia, and the Margaret River region where Alex takes up the invite to the Puharich family creamery, hoping for some foodie type stories to sell her editor, and the chance to eat her body weight in cheese. Next thing, and the sticky-nosing Alex draws a couple of lines between something she saw at the funeral in Croatia, and a warehouse in Margaret River, and she's climbing fences, hiding under trucks and getting herself into quite a pickle in search of a story.

Aside from a couple of murders, there's lots of sideways, byways, shops, pubs, meals, cars, hippy mother / straight-laced father (divorced), shoes, clothes, more shoes, odd caravan park owners, surfies, trucks, late night sea arrivals, a bit of lurking around the aforementioned warehouse, a bit more lurking around in sand dunes, a convenient cop friend, eating of cheese, drinking of wine, Croatian references, food (did I mention meals....) in FROMAGE.

This is most definitely on the lighter, chick-lit side of crime fiction, with a hefty dose of shoes thrown in. Lots of shoes (can you tell I noticed the shoes), lots of cheese and an unexpected amount of light-hearted, wise-cracking, slightly dotty fun along the way. Perfect way to distract from life, the universe, with luckily, no effect whatsoever on a life-long hatred of shoe shopping.