Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Key Lime Pie


Key Lime Pie
By: Josi S. Kilpack

Sadie is at it again.  Another body, another mystery.   Her motives and objective are different, and her life is starting to look like a teenage girl’s with too many boyfriends to choose from (don’t worry it’s still clean).

Summary
When Sadie’s new friend, Eric, gets a call from the Florida police saying they may have found his daughter who has been missing for several years, Eric doesn’t hesitate to jump on a plane and head down there.  Before he leaves he asks Sadie to come with him.  Sadie is torn.  She’s in a relationship (which at the moment is rocky) with Pete, but also wants to be there for her friend Eric.  Sadie also suspects that her feelings toward Eric are more than just friendship.  She wants to see if go-with-the-flow Eric is more suited for her than steady and stable Pete.
Sadie goes. 
Sadie and Eric find out a lot about each other and about themselves.  The question is, are they ready to face the truth.  Is Sadie ready to face the truth about her feelings and why she ultimately went to Florida?  Is Eric ready to face the truth about his daughter?  Could the truth be too much for him to bear?  How she disappeared and where she ended up.

How This Book is Different
It becomes clear in the first several chapters Sadie and Eric are not looking for the murderer, they are trying to find out if Eric’s daughter is still alive, and if so where is she.  This differs from the previous books in the series in that there is a murder and Sadie is looking for the murderer, not a missing person who may or may not be dead.
Sadie’s motives are also different in Key Lime Pie.  Instead of curiosity being the main reason she desires to solve the mystery (as it has been in the previous two books), Sadie’s desire is to help Eric.
Relationships also start to bubble in this book.  Sadie has to choose between Pete and Eric.  Where is her heart?  In the series Sadie has never had an emotional conflict before.  Not only do these things develop Sadie’s character more, but they also add depth to the series as a whole.

Personal Review
This is the book that kept me reading.  If Key Lime Pie were about another murder to solve I probably wouldn’t have kept reading onto book number five.  But because Key Lime Pie was more about Sadie’s development and choices I wanted to continue with the series to find out what happened to Sadie, not about what happened in the next mystery, although the next mystery is nothing like the previous ones! 
I thought Pete’s and Eric’s characters were very well done in this book.  I have found that many of Kilpack’s characters are flat, meaning they don’t have much depth to them and can be traded out with one another.  Not Pete and Eric.  These two men are non-interchangeable.  Though we have known Pete since Lemon Tart, and he’s not a big character in the previous books, there is a depth to him in Key Lime Pie that is not seen in any of the previous books.  As for Eric, we have only met him in Devil’s Food Cake, yet I felt as if I knew him while reading Key Lime Pie.  He is only physically present for about half the book.  At the end of it I had a good idea of what his character was like, and who I thought Sadie should choose to be with. 



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