Deadly to the Core, by Joyce Tremel

Another illustrated cover, another small town cozy; what can I say? There are far too many of these in the ARC TBR mountain range, and I’m aiming at reading those I have and requesting fewer to none more (unless I’ve read and enjoyed previous entries, that is).

Beware: copaganda, slut shaming

Deadly to the Core, by Joyce Tremel

The story, first in the Cider House series, is narrated in first person, past tense, by Kate Mulligan, née Driscoll; a recent widow in her early thirties, she moves back to the small town where her late mother grew up, after her maternal uncle dies and leaves her an orchard. This gives her the opportunity to open a cidery, as she had once dreamed to do with Brian, her late husband.

Before the novel starts, Kate had survived the accident that killed Brian, and then spent about half a year in recovery from her injuries, between hospitalization and physical therapy, and so, all of her communication with her late uncle’s lawyer and with the manager of the orchard, has been via email.

Over her first few days in Orchardville (yes, really), it seems that Kate’s new life will go on smoothly; despite not having visited the area for the past two decades, Kate is welcomed back with open arms by both the longtime residents she knew from her childhood summer stays at the farm, and by the newer residents of the area.

Then she finds a body.

The publisher sets the story thus:

After losing her husband in a terrible car crash, thirty-five-year-old Kate is left to pick up the pieces of her life alone. Although she has physically recovered, she worries her spirit never will. But when she learns that she has inherited a fruit orchard in a small town just outside Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, from her great uncle Stan, she takes this as an opportunity ripe for the picking. Kate knew immediately what to do with it: open a cider house. Her hopeful plans fall far from the tree when she finds the body of the orchard manager, Carl Randolph, leaving her to figure out who is at the core of this murder.

She had been in correspondence with Carl, who had agreed with her brilliant idea of opening a cider house. But not everyone is so quick to buy what she was selling—Uncle Stan’s lawyer, Robert Larabee, paints a less rosy financial outlook of the orchard’s past, present, and future. 

Kate discovers that Carl had large, unexplained deposits to his bank account and it becomes clear that either he was blackmailing someone, or someone was paying him to keep quiet. Meanwhile, Kate and her neighbors receive offers to buy their property from a mysterious buyer. And there’s more than meets the eye with the neighboring orchard owner, Daniel Martinez, although Kate can’t quite put her finger on if it’s sweet or sour.

Will she be able to pick out the bad apple among the bunch before it’s too late?

The book suffers from “first in a series” syndrome, as the author establishes the cast of secondary characters and the setting, as well as dangling plot threads for future installments, which takes some space from the current mystery, though not so much as to clutter the narrative unduly.

The writing is very readable, if not memorable; the only character with depth is Kate herself, with the secondary characters divided into those who are marked as part of Kate’s inner circle, those who show up only to advance the plot, and a handful of others who are likely to play more important roles in later books.

For example, the first local people Kate encounters are the owner of the local Emporium and his wife, who not only stock her up on groceries for free and invite her to dinner, but also fill in blanks on Kate’s family history that she wasn’t aware of herself, such as the reason for her mother’s estrangement with her family. After that, they only show up again to provide yet more background information to help Kate solve the mystery behind Carl’s murder.

Then there’s Margaret, who had been Kate’s boon companion during those childhood summers, and who immediately becomes Kate’s closest friend again. To be clear, we have been told that Kate had not come back to town for over twenty years, and had no contact whatsoever with her uncle or grandmother during that time. And yet, Kate knows all there is to know about Margaret’s marriage, divorce, and current situation, and vice versa.

This is never explained, but serves the purpose of providing Kate with someone she can trust, who will introduce her to other people she can trust, or reassure her as to the trustworthiness of the people around her–such as Daniel Martinez, helpful neighbor, fellow small orchard owner, former state cop, and clearly Kate’s future love interest.

Then we have characters such as chatterbox Cherry Perry, who only appears in two scenes, mostly as one of the local eccentrics, or the twin brothers Daniel recommends Kate hire to help her manage the orchard now that Carl is dead (more on them later).

I found Kate’s mourning of her husband of a dozen years, and generally her thought processes and reactions to what happens around her, quite believable for most of the book. She’s not only starting over in a new place, and starting a business there no less, but she’s also still recovering from extensive physical injuries; at one point, she reflects that she’s “been put back together with titanium”.

However, she’s soon tackling the finishing touches in the renovation of the orchard’s old barn into her new cidery, with few mentions of any physical limitations, other than occasional mentions of difficulty sleeping, or tiring easily.

Speaking of the cidery, while I cannot vouch for any of the cider production stuff, I’m glad that Kate actually spends time both working on, and thinking about, her business, with updates on the barn remodel, equipment installation, etc., and later the fermentation, and so on; all of this establishes Kate’s competency, without crowding the narrative with excessive detail.

Mind you, there is some repetition, but in a way that makes sense, such as when Kate is sharing things she’s learned from one person with someone else, or when she’s trying to make sense of the timeline of events leading to the first and second murders; here the repetitions work because we can see how our amateur sleuth’s thinking about events changes as she learns more.

In fact, I found the small town stuff fairly realistic; other than the cutesy name (Orchardville), the author considers both the economic and cultural realities of rural life. The small businesses in town depend fairly heavily on tourism to nearby Gettysburg, and many lean on it, such as the antiques store where the owner dresses like Ulysses Grant, and so on.

Many of the landowners in the surrounding area come from families who’ve owned the same land for a hundred years or more, and who are generally leery for newcomers seeking to change the culture of the town. And, as in any self-respecting small town, most of the local residents have known each other, or at least of each other, for most of their lives, which serves Kate well as she puzzles together the history behind current events.

Now, one of the nods to reality in the setting comes from the fact that while the farmers own the land, they hire seasonal workers, specifically Mexican migrants, during harvest to do the heavy lifting; in fact, one of Carl’s original qualifications for the job as Kate’s uncle manager was that he spoke Spanish, and thus could hire and handle the seasonal work force. When Daniel recommends the Díaz twins to Kate, he emphasizes that they are fluent in Spanish, being the sons of Mexican immigrants, and how this is an essential asset for an orchard owner. (footnote ¹)

For his part, despite his last name and his own fluency in Spanish, Daniel is written very much as a white man, from his physical description to his position in the community. He has owned land near town for a good decade and, as a former cop, he’s afforded a level of respect and trust by most of the long time residents in a way that Carl, who had lived there longer, wasn’t.

I read the book in a couple of sittings; despite a few issues with the rhythm of the narrative, I was intrigued by the mystery, and engaged by the narrative voice.

However, I found the climax, well, anticlimactic. When the villain is revealed, both his motivations and persona suddenly become utterly cartoonish, which contrast unfavorably with the mostly-realistic setup up to that point; even worse, a few previous events which had, up to then, confused both Kate and the cops, are either handwaved or dropped entirely in the aftermath.

On balance, it was a decent enough read, but not the kind of novel that will have me marking down the calendar for the next in the series.

Deadly to the Core gets a 7.50 out of 10

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¹ I could go on a whole rant about how farmers are portrayed in U.S. genre fiction, and especially in genre romance, as “the salt of the Earth”, but that is a reflection of the general mythos of farming; generally, however, farmers exploit farm workers unconscionably all over the country, the same in “small family farms” as in larger corporate ones.