Dear Fellow Reader,

Years ago, I joined an online writers’ group. It was fun and interesting getting to know a few of the writers in the group. Several of them are now published authors. I am not one of them but I have gotten to watch and see how well they have done. It has been a pleasure to support them.

One of the most successful of the group has been Jennifer Chow. She has authored eleven books and is part of an anthology. She has the four cozy mystery series, the Winston Wong Cozies series, the Sassy Cat Mysteries, the L.S. Night Market Mysteries, and her latest, the Magical Fortune Cookie Mysteries. She also has Dragonfly Dreams, which is a YA novel, and The 228 Legacy. Phew! Isn’t that terrific!

Her latest book is out today. Ill-Fated Fortune is the first in the new Magical Fortune Cookie series. In this series, we meet Felicity Jin. Felicity (called Lissa by her best friend, Kelvin) and her mom are bakers. Her mom owns Gold Bakery in Pixie, CA, which is right next to Fresno, CA. Her good friend Kelvin who owns the florist store next to Gold Bakery and Alma Paz owns Paz Illuminations which is on the other side of Gold Bakery.

The women in the Jin family have a gift for baking. Well, they have for generations but it seems to have stopped with Lissa. She cannot bake at all. Their store specializes in two kinds of baked goods, pineapple buns, and egg tarts. Their customers can’t get enough of them. At 28, Lissa thinks the gift has passed her by. Until one day she and Kelvin go to lunch at a new Chinese restaurant. They feel that the food is terrible and then they try the fortune cookies. Lissa feels inspired and goes home and makes fortune cookies and they are terrific! She comes in to try at work again the next day and they are still terrific. She starts making them and selling them in the bakery. And then it came to putting fortunes in the cookies. She added some handwritten generic messages and sent the cookies out to the front of the store. Late the first afternoon, an Asian man came in and wanted to try her new fortune cookie. She needed to bake one for him as there weren’t any left in the store. The man talked to her mom while she made the cookie but he didn’t seem very pleasant. She forgot to put a message in his cookie but was going to give it to him without but when he was taking the cookie from her, he scratched her and she felt this overwhelming need to write a fortune for him. She actually even felt dizzy with the need to write out his fortune. She wrote out the fortune and gave it to him. He looked at it, made a face, and left. Lissa had no idea what she had written down as his fortune. They locked the door after he left, cleaned up the kitchen and store, took out the garbage, and went home.

The next morning, they got to work and there were police cars in the cul-de-sac by the store. It turns out there was a body in the dumpster behind the store and Lissa ended up being a suspect in the murder.

During the story, Lissa feels that she needs to find the murderer and clear her name but also find out more about her new “superpower” of baking fortune cookies and writing fortunes.

I found the book enjoyable. The characters were fun and the book moved at a good pace. Lissa’s youth made it interesting and her relationship with Kelvin was good for the story. While it is part of the new Magical Fortune Cookie series, I would say that the “mystical” part of the book was not heavy-handed and was just fun. I would suggest that you read Ill-Fated Fortune.

I was given a copy of this book so that I would give an unbiased review.

Thanks for reading!