Dead Cereus by Kira Seamon

Item: Dead Cereus
Rating: 4
Author: karenbaron

Posted January 3, 2022 by karenbaron in Mystery, New Adult Fiction, Review, Romance / 0 Comments

I voluntarily reviewed an Advance Reader Copy from . This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Dead Cereus

by Kira Seamon

Published by Kira Seamon on January 18, 2022
Genres: Cozy Paranormal Romantic Mystery
Pages: 243
Format: Kindle
Goodreads
Get Your Copy at: Amazon

Holy holly berries! "Hurricane Holly" creates shenanigans on the Olympic level. This mischievous charmer has found herself in many strange messes, but this one takes the carrot cake!

With her college scholarship already on frost alert, when Holly accidentally douses the college's most distinguished donors, she sees her degree and her relationship with the hot Master Gardener quickly wilting.

Her only chance of remaining in Shellesby is to win a vaunted internship with a famous chocolatier. The only problem? The other candidate is Holly’s biggest rival, a stuck-up queen bee-and she just might have her sights set on Holly’s swoon-worthy boyfriend as well!

With a chance to win over the prestigious chocolatier when the rare night-blooming cereus plant is scheduled to open its petals at the Night Lights Gala, Holly is there-and so is a killer. Events unfold that not only place her scholarship on the line, but also her life…and that of her rival.

Holly finds herself racing the clock to save her arch nemesis, secure her scholarship, and catch a murderer, if she can! Enjoy this lighthearted romp with its plethora of plants and wonderful characters by picking up a copy of Dead Cereus today! Can Holly stand the heat in the hothouse or is she headed for a spectacular meltdown?
This is an epic romance and a fantastic, unique mystery rolled into one hilarious story. With all the feels, this novel can’t help but implant itself in your heart and grow into one of your favorite reads. Put your petal to the metal and see what all the buzz is about. Dead Cereus is to die for!

Come for the mystery, stay for the food. Chocolate plays a big role in this book; you will ‘chocolate’ as you've never ‘chocolated’ before! Hot new debut author Kira Seamon makes botany cool again, one plant at a time.

Dead Cereus by Kira Seamon is about this young college junior who is on a scholarship and trying to keep from being expelled.

A murderer kills the chocolatier and kidnaps Holly’s new friend. Will Holly catch this person?

The Story

Holly Jackson is a college junior, and she’s at the prestigious Shellesby College on scholarship while working at the greenhouses. Those greenhouses have a lot more than plants growing in them. Holly is in the center of almost everything going on at the greenhouses, but she doesn’t mean to be. She also happens to be dating an older guy named William. I don’t know where Holly finds the time to attend classes and work in the greenhouses and cook.

A lot happens within a short period for Holly that she gets suspended and has to figure out how to move within the grounds of that suspension. The chocolatier gets killed before the suspension, and she has to figure out how to help the police catch the killer. Holly, as a character, is different, and I don’t know if I care about her or not. She is someone that I probably wouldn’t be friends with her.

Four Stars

Dead Cereus by Kira Seamon is definitely a different cozy mystery than what I usually encounter in this genre. Holly is in the role of sleuth but isn’t really detecting anything that isn’t already known. It’s a very confusing story that I’m still trying to wrap my head around. I am giving Dead Cereus by Kira Seamon four stars.

Don’t forget to take a look at the recipes in the back. They are Captivating Carrot Cake, Classy Chicken Curry, Genuine Ginger Snap Cookies, Purple Yams, Sassy Sauerkraut, Holly’s Radiant Raspberry Muffins, Braised Red Cabbage, Grilled Pacific Rim Tuna, Scintillating Spaetzle, and Holly’s World Famous Ratatouille.

Thank you for dropping by! I hope you enjoyed this review of Dead Cereus by Kira Seamon.

Until the next time,

Happy Reading!

About Kira Seamon

Kira Kanani Seamon was born and raised in Hawaii. She attended the prestigious Punahou School as an award-winning honor student. A polymath, Kira is a gold medal/state winner in piano performance and a National and two-time Regional Dance Champion. She’s an award-winning photographer and has had her art accepted and sold in national and regional juried shows. She’s had over fifty newspaper cover stories about her art and is a fourteen-time grant recipient from cultural councils. She celebrated her first solo museum exhibit of her work in 2020. She was recently the inaugural artist-in-residence in Natick, Massachusetts. She received a personal letter from the Massachusetts Senate President and a Certificate of Recognition from the Massachusetts State Legislation in recognition of her grant from Framingham, Massachusetts. All of this culminated in her receiving the prestigious Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award, for which she appeared in the Wall Street Journal in 2020.

She took a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Machu Picchu, Peru with the Punahou Alumni Association and her travel tale about that expedition is published in the 2021 September/October edition of the Writers and Readers’ Magazine. Additionally, her Peru photography is the editorial feature in the 2021 fall edition of DRIFT Travel magazine. DRIFT Travel is an upscale travel and lifestyle magazine with each issue being emailed to 4+ million digital magazine readers worldwide. Additionally, DRIFT is also part of the PressReader magazine/newspaper digital platform that puts DRIFT in thousands of hotels, cruise ships, resorts and airlines around the world, opening the door to an additional 300 million users annually. Her horror short story, A Cereus Curse, is published in Terror Tract’s Hell-o-Ween 2021 anthology. Kira feels humor is her superpower! She loves making people laugh and inserted as much humor in this book as possible. She has never met a story from Greek mythology that she didn’t love and has kept a daily journal since her teens. Dead Cereus is her first novel.

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