After all the… excitement of solving her ex-boyfriend’s murder, Lila Macapagal is ready for things to return to normal and open a cafe with her best friend and her best friend’s girlfriend.  But she can’t seem to find any baking inspiration, and she’s been roped into judging the local beauty pageant, and -- oh, yeah, there we go.  Another dead body.  Can Lila put those detective skills back to work and solve this mystery?

I have been waiting for this book since I read the first one, and it did NOT disappoint.  Manansala is writing exactly the kind of cozy mystery I’m interested in reading: a diverse cast of characters, a lead who acknowledges 1 - how freakin’ weird it is that they keep finding bodies and 2 - (eventually) that finding murder victims and solving their deaths is kind of traumatizing, a cop who’s increasingly critical of cops, and friends who aren’t afraid to call you out when you’re being a jerk.

There’s a lot of growth for Lila in this book: I will admit to being annoyed a bit in the last book with the way she strung her love interests along and how she treated her cousin.  That continues in this book, but is thankfully called out by her friends and family, and Lila does some introspection there.  I love a fully fleshed out main character, and Lila never feels like a Mary Sue or a random citizen who happens to be really good at figuring out crimes.  I’m particularly interested to see how Lila’s relationship with her body progresses: there’s a lot of thinking about exercise as a holistic benefit in this installment, which I didn’t find problematic, but there’s still comments here and there about Lila’s weight.  I’d love to see her changing relationship with her body become a larger piece of the book.

Anyways, I really love this series and Lila in particular.  The only bad part about reading an ARC (thanks Berkley and NetGalley!) is that now I have to wait even longer for the third one!  

CW:

murder, finding bodies, suspected suicide, parental deaths not on page, police and suspicion of having committed a crime, mild fatphobia, PTSD, brief mention of infertility/miscarriage, sexual misconduct.  Mia’s listed out much of this in her author’s note at the beginning of the book, too.