Tasty Tussles and the Old Cupcake Hustle: Of Prints and Princesses

Publish or perish.  Also, high school never ends.  These maxims came to mind as I read Jenn McKinlay's Going, Going, Ganache and Dying for Devil's Food.  Even if Going, Going, Ganache isn't about academia but a struggling magazine.  

After turning a photoshoot into a food fight, Mel and the rest of the Fairy Tale Cupcakes crew are sentenced to run a baking boot camp for the Southwest Style staffers.  But things really go south when one of the reporters is murdered.  As a writer who exposed Arizona's elite, the guy had a lot of enemies.  So it's up to Mel to find out which one silenced him for good.  

In Dying for Devil's Food, Mel is guilted into catering her fifteenth high school reunion despite being bullied as an overweight teen.  True to form, some of the popular kids, including the class mean queen, sling backhanded compliments about her now-svelte figure.  But the real trouble starts when said queen goes to powder her nose -- and never returns.  A poisoned cocktail points to murder -- and a lipstick-scrawled message makes Mel the prime suspect.

So there you have it in a pastry shell.  Copy and cattiness kill.

That said, the real crime would be if Fairy Tale Cupcakes used pastry shells.