Beat Up a Cookie: An Ellie Bernstein/Lt. Peter Miller Mystery

Bernstein/Miller Mystery #2

by Denise Dietz

Ellie Bernstein loves eating and watching M*A*S*H reruns, but when people who look like characters in the series start dying, she suspects a serial killer and realizes that, after her weight loss, she looks too much like Hot Lips.

Genres: Mystery, Cozy Mystery

223 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

When Denise [Deni] Dietz was in the third grade, she wrote her first story, The Pencil Who Grew Up to Be a Stub. Although the assignment was to write a one-page story, using an ink pen, Deni wrote a five-page story, first-person...and she used a pencil (the narrator of her story). Whereupon, she received a failing grade for not following orders. Like Hitchcock the Dog in Footprints in the Butter, Deni doesn't follow orders unless they make sense.

Years later, after Deni had enjoyed a short-lived singing career and acting career, she sat at her typewriter, flexed her fingers, and pounded out her first culinary mystery: Throw Darts at a Chessecake, inspired by her part-time job as a Weight Watchers lecturer. In Cheesecake diet club members are getting killed off at goal weight and eating as if their lives depended on it. Switching to a computer, Deni hit the bestseller list with Footprints in the Butter - an Ingrid Beaumont Mystery co-starring Hitchcock the Dog. She followed that success with her stand-alone, Fifty Cents for Your Soul, her "reluctant witch mystery," Eye of Newt and three more diet club mysteries.

Married to Aussie/Canadian author, Gordon Aalborg (AKA Victoria Gordon), whom she met on-line through a writers loop, Deni moved to Vancouver Island, where she is owned by a chocolate Lab named Magic.

Reviews

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Feisty divorced Ellie Bernstein crosses paths with a serial killer several times before she realizes that people who look like characters on the television show M*A*S*H are being murdered. There's a small group of men who gather to watch M*A*S*H reruns, and Ellie finds them especially suspicious. Her boyfriend, police detective Peter Miller, is willing to investigate them, but really wants Ellie to keep safely out of the investigation.

[Drew- Pickleball Librarian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exciting mystery novel that takes place in Colorado Springs and actually uses real places! If you're a fan of M*A*S*H, you really ought to read this because characters in the book show up at the murder scene in portraying various M*A*S*H characters.

[Melanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not one of my more favorite mysteries. Jumps around too much; still I might try another in the series.

[Cynthia Rielley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Decided to try another from this author, this one was better but still too jumpy and unpleasing

[Diane Large · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another one in my cozy mystery series. To have the murders based on M.A.S.H. characters was different. I did correctly guess the murderer, which is rare for me.