Snooty French wedding planner, and Carnegie’s main business rival, Beau Paliere has been hired by the Seattle Navigator’s baseball team to plan the nuptials of new home run king, Gordo Gutierrez and Goth rock babe, Honeysuckle Hell. However Beau needs someone on his staff that knows Seattle like the back of her hand, so Carnegie, seeing dollar signs and a resume boost, agrees to the take the job. With her upcoming nuptials to reporter Aaron Gold, the cash infusion couldn’t hurt. Now all she has to do is survive working for Beau, who is not only an exacting taskmaster, but also a major pain in the rear.

If the wedding wasn’t a bizarre enough affair, it gets more complicated when a nosy, and completely unlikable, baseball reporter is bludgeoned to death after an engagement party at the ballpark. When the police arrest Carnegie’s good friend (and series favorite) Boris the Mad Russian Florist, she’s determined to clear his name. However Aaron wants her to stay out of it and let the police do their job. What’s a girl to do?

Donnelly continues her top notch series by giving fans what they have come to expect – lots of local Seattle color, memorable and amusing secondary characters and a nice, little mystery bubbling at the surface. Series regulars are all back in this installment – Boris, Juice Nugent, cake maker extraordinaire, the Killer B’s, and the continuing saga of Carnegie and Aaron. They might be engaged, but suddenly Aaron is neglecting her for baseball of all things. Poor Carnegie just doesn’t seem to understand how amazing it is that the Chicago Cubs are in the World Series (this is fiction, Donnelly can write about hell freezing over).

Fans of the series are likely to get a bit more out of Bride and Doom than newcomers, as while it does stand alone, the characters mean a bit more with the previous development featured in earlier titles. That said, the mystery here is light without losing any punch. The dead reporter was rather loathsome – so who killed him? Donnelly provides a variety of suspects, although motives are a bit more vague. The fact that the guy was a jerk certainly doesn’t hurt, but is that enough to kill someone? One particular motive becomes the focus by the second half of the novel though, and it gives the author several suspects to work with.

This is another amusing entry to a fun series. Better still, Donnelly foregoes a cliffhanger in the ending, a trademark that made for exciting, albeit frustrating, reading when one has to wait a year to get the resolution. A tidy mystery, amusing characters, and a return to the Seattle scene make Bride And Doom another wedding to remember.

--Wendy Crutcher