Welcome to my stop on the Great Escapes Virtual Book Tour for A Chocolate is Announced (Bean to Bar Mysteries) by Amber Royer. Stop by each blog on the tour for interviews, guest posts, spotlights, reviews and more!
A Chocolate is Announced (Bean to Bar Mysteries) by Amber Royer
A Chocolate is Announced (Bean to Bar Mysteries)
Cozy Mystery
7th in Series
Setting – Texas
Publisher : Golden Tip Press (June 25, 2024)
Print length : 277 pages
Felicity Koerber is finally getting her life together. She has a fiancé, her bean to bar chocolate shop on Galveston’s historic Strand has become a gathering spot for the community, and she is ready to embrace whatever the future holds. She’s ready for another launch party – despite the disaster at her grand opening, when she’d first gotten involved with solving a murder. And this time she’s embracing her status as a sleuth. She’s hosting a murder mystery weekend to celebrate the new Mystery Flavor line of craft chocolate bars. She’s held a contest to choose the attendees, who will all stay at her aunt’s flip hotel and enjoy the island. It’s all supposed to be perfectly random – only, Felicity starts to uncover connections between her guests. When one of them winds up murdered, Felicity has to keep her aunt from becoming the main suspect.
The killer is very clearly calling Felicity out, leaving clues that mean little to anyone other than her. But that doesn’t narrow down the suspect pool. Her guests are there because they love the true crime podcast she’s been featured on. And she can’t decide whether the killer wants her to catch them – or just wants to taunt her.
Meanwhile, Felicity is also playing host to her future in-laws and discovers that her fiancé’s sister, who is also a cop, is very competitive. Can Felicity hold her own and make a good impression, while keeping her business together and her aunt out of jail? And can Felicity solve it in time to protect the people she cares about from becoming additional victims?
Satchmo the retired police dog turned therapy dog returns to help her sniff out a few clues, and one of the guests brings along a ferret named Cheeseburger, who keeps showing up in the most unexpected places.
Author Guest Post: The Impermanence of Sandcastles
You know you’re married to an engineering type when you go to build a sand castle, and he immediately starts building a retaining wall and a cut out to deal with “flooding.” That castle lasted for hours, despite the incoming tide. Still, eventually the castle succumbed. Sand castles and sand sculptures are all about impermanence. You get to engage in the art of creating something, and have a blast doing it, but there’s no way to take it home. It’s soon relegated to a memory, or at best a photo that will come up in your timeline three years later reminding you of a perfect afternoon, with salt on the breeze and a seagull trying to snatch your picnic lunch.
A Chocolate is Announced is the seventh book in my Bean to Bar Mysteries, which are set on Galveston Island, a fictionalized version of the self-same place where that sand castle was built – along with many others over the years. I grew up in Southeast Texas, so Sea Rim State Park and Crystal Beach (on the coast) and East Beach and the spot under Murdoch’s (on the island) loom large in my childhood memories. Maybe the sandcastles of my youth are more stylized images in my head, simply because they are from a time before I discovered photography, but they still take me back, even though that particular sand isn’t even in the same spot on the beach.
In each book in the series, I’ve intentionally included something I love about Galveston. I’ve talked about the sea turtles and the cruise port – but this time most of the book is set in a single location, inside the hotel Felicity’s aunt is flipping. So the part about Galveston I decided to highlight is the beach. Felicity actually has a moment where she thinks about growing up on the island, and how it was to move away and return home. This feels fitting, since Felicity is moving into a new phase of her life, now that she has chosen between her love interests and made peace with her past. She’s still going to have challenges – the least of which is fitting into a new family when her fiancé’s parents and sister descend on the hotel. But it is a new part of her arc, now that she has learned to take risks and to embrace change. Which makes the beach – and in particular the mentions of sand art – feel so appropriate. So much about her life before was wiped away, and now she’s building something new.
Felicity is a widow, and (in the background of solving a series of baffling murders) the first few books were about her learning to live for herself and to move forward from grief. Only then was she whole enough to figure out what she wanted her future to look like. Resistance to change has been a recurring theme in my work, probably because I have trouble dealing with it myself. But my protagonists usually grow to embrace it, because with change comes possibilities. A new love, a new job, a new community. These things are fun to read about, because they are exciting unknowns that bring potential challenges and inevitable problems. These make up the most memorable scenes in a book or series. Even after the problem is solved (the immediacy of that scene washed away, to return to the sand art metaphor) as readers, we tend to remember the traits the character showed, the emotion we felt, the stylized version, if you will. Those are the things that I, as a writer, need to make sure are there in every scene, in every book. There needs to be a reason for each piece included in the writing – and I find that by the end of each book I’ve written, I’m a slightly different person, probably because of the lessons my characters’ are learning about how to deal with life.
Personally, most of my hobbies have an element of impermanence. Food art, such as decorated cakes, are also impermanent, leaving behind the memories of people made happy by a taste. Photography is inevitably going to capture only a moment, and only one angle, never as vividly as the real thing. But I find that my writing tends to mine those memories, offering up details that can be included in a scene, or give clues to the way a character would feel, even through different specific circumstances that tie emotionally to some loss or setback I’ve experienced.
And I still love going to the beach. Even if it is the same location, things are always changing, and it will be slightly different – but usually still familiar despite the effects of storms and erosion and seashells freshly washed ashore. And I’m up for building a sand castle, for as long as it lasts.
About Amber Royer
Amber Royer writes the CHOCOVERSE comic telenovela-style foodie-inspired space opera series, and the BEAN TO BAR MYSTERIES. She is also the author of STORY LIKE A JOURNALIST: A WORKBOOK FOR NOVELISTS, which boils down her writing knowledge into an actionable plan involving over 100 worksheets to build a comprehensive story plan for your novel. She blogs about creative writing technique and all things chocolate at www.amberroyer.com. She also teaches creative writing and is an author coach. If you are very nice to her, she might make you cupcakes. Chocolate cupcakes, of course.
Author Links
Website: http://www.amberroyer.com
Blog: http://amberroyer.com/blog/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amberroyerauthor/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Amber.Royer.Author/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoA_29HV2nPmRnox9LPVanw
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/amber_royer
Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/Amber-Royer/e/B00PFV4CGM
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8144619.Amber_Royer
Purchase Links:
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CZMXM3BN/
Enter the Giveaway
A Chocolate Is Announced TOUR PARTICIPANTS
June 24 – Mystery, Thrillers, and Suspense – SPOTLIGHT
June 25 – Eskimo Princess Book Reviews – SPOTLIGHT
June 26 – Celticlady’s Reviews – SPOTLIGHT
June 27 – Books, Ramblings, and Tea – SPOTLIGHT
June 28 – Christy’s Cozy Corners – AUTHOR GUEST POST
June 29 – FUONLYKNEW – SPOTLIGHT
June 29 – fundinmental – CHARACTER GUEST POST
June 30 – Cozy Up With Kathy – CHARACTER GUEST POST
July 1 – Maureen’s Musing – SPOTLIGHT
July 2 – Ruff Drafts – AUTHOR INTERVIEW
July 3 – Literary Gold – SPOTLIGHT
July 4 – OFF DAY
July 5 – MJB Reviewers – SPOTLIGHT
July 6 – Sarah Can’t Stop Reading – REVIEW
July 6 – Escape With Dollycas Into A Good Book – AUTHOR GUEST POST
July 7 – Sapphyria’s Book Reviews – SPOTLIGHT
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Sounds like a great read.
Thanks for the spotlight on A Chocolate is Announced! I love getting to let new readers know about these characters.
This looks like a new series I need to try!!
I am looking forward to reading A Chocolate is Announced. Thanks for the giveaway!