In this incomplete book review series, I will review only an Amazon sample portion or the first fifteen pages of a book. The first section will be a completely honest and unbiased review of these introductory pages. In the second section I will wildly speculate about how the plot progresses.

Incomplete Book Review of the Cinnamon Roll Murder

(In which we find out no cinnamon rolls were actually injured in the production of this book)

The intro to the Cinnamon Roll Murder follows the epic journey of Hannah Swensen as she careens down the Minnesota highway at a screaming 40 mph in her cookie mobile on her way to see a band called Cinnamon-something. It’s never clear what drugs she has ingested that would convince her that any of this is acceptable behavior, and soon it becomes apparent that her destiny is to narrowly avoid a dozen-car pileup caused by some reckless out-of-staters who clearly do not comprehend the metaphysical stasis that has reduced Minnesota’s seasons into the snow season, the mud season, and two others that are too similar to remember. We are constantly reminded that this is cow country, eg with clever references to KCOW, the only radio station moniker that makes any sense in a world so cold and brutal as the MN.

Soon Swensen pulls a Tom Cruise and lethargically joins the scene of the accident, ripping open bus doors with all the gusto of an arthritic He-man. But what happens next and why? You’re guess is as good as mine as this reviewer became psychically snow blind halfway through the read…

The rest of this review was put together from the mad ramblings written down on cheap a Kleenex that I found beneath the store bookshelf. This may or may not represent what actually happens next and a plausible opinion about it:

The band’s bus had overturned pretty badly. It was like three different realities intersected at once and then we were tossed into the white one. Hanna Swensen’s disembodied head rolled down the aisle. She was somehow able to stay alive through the use of teleportation…but this might not be wholly accurate.

Here it must be noted that the author Joanne Fluke arduously captures the bitter disappointment that living in Minnesota must impart, and this bus accident is the pinnacle of malaise. Nobody seems to care that there is this big box of bloody bodies and certainly Hannah has time to stop and make small chat in between. You have to think that both she and her compatriot Michelle have been trapped in the land of cows for so long that indifference has become a way of life.

Fluke knows how to hide the ball: the bus driver’s demise is either the result of a chemical journey of the mind or sudden impact, though the difference between the two can sometimes be so subtle as to require the application of methodological skepticism to discern. There’s a puppy involved somewhere among the rescue efforts and soon enough the story refocuses its lasers onto the dog’s journey to the loving arms of Hannah’s colleague, who adopts the poor pup. It’s not clear whether we are supposed to care about the recovery of the crash victims, or anything else for that matter.

I’d rate this as a pass, mostly because the title makes me hungry for its gooey, delicious namesake and I don’t need any more reasons to shove sugar down my throat.

How the Plot would progress if I wrote the book:

The real mystery obviously centers on the mysterious heart attack death of the bus driver, but the puppy is a good distraction. The next fifty pages are populated with cute stories about they teach the dog to run around in circles and breed him off with a corgi with a broken tail. However, it all turns to tragedy when the corgi is savagely mauled to death by a wolf. Hannah and Michelle are happily conducting their cookie truck business when someone slips a note under the backdoor. The note reads: “Don’t blame the driver.”

A tangled web of deceit and espionage is revealed as Hannah interviews the band members who had been riding on the bus that day. Their drug-addled minds prove tough to crack, but Hannah discovers that Lee Campbell, the band manager, had been part of a military mission in Kosovo that gave him a terrible case of PTSD. He’d thought that operation Human-Watermelon had ended, but he’d been completely wrong.

As it turns out, the day of the accident, the bus had been hit by a beam from a government satellite.  The beam had hit the bus with a frequency that could constrict human blood vessels of the enemies of the state. This had been a test, though the government had not anticipated the prying ways of Hannah Swensen, who cleverly infiltrates the military base in Winnetka disguised as a cow. Finally, she finds herself facing off against the cyborg rebuild of Ronald Reagan, who had been kindly souped-up with kaleidoscopic death rays and tritanium claws. He’s horribly misunderstood, like any insane robot, though that doesn’t stop Hannah from outwitting him and impaling him with a vintage, rusty bayonet that she removes from a display case.

The Ronald Reagan Robot’s dying words were: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. Government is not the solution.”