Tusks, Tails and Teacakes by T.L. StoneMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
If the cover and the format of the title didn't clue you in, this is cozy fantasy of the Legends and Lattes variety. Sword-and-sorcery/D&D world (with tieflings carefully renamed as "hellkin" and tabaxi as "panthera" for legal distinctness), in which an adventurer leaves the life and settles down in a nice little town running a hospitality business. It isn't just one of the several clones, though; it has its own original plot and characters in the same subgenre, so if you're a Travis Baldree fan you can read it and enjoy it without feeling like it's just an inferior ripoff.
The reason for the protagonist, a half-elf rogue named Lira, to come to a small-town tavern and start working there is a strong one, not less so for the fact that it's a version of the inciting incident for half the cozy mystery/romance books set in small towns: she's originally from there, and left after her grandmother died, in order to go on the road with an adventuring party. Now, in the wake of the loss of a companion (told in the prologue), her party has broken up, and she's come back to get something she stashed when she left with them originally some years previously: her grandmother's recipe book, all she has of the woman who raised her apart from the memories. Unfortunately, she buried it in the tavern cellar, and someone has since built a stone wall on top of the spot (it never becomes clear who, or exactly why, or when), complicating the retrieval.
Presumably at some point she came back, because there's also some gold buried with the book, and she didn't have any when she left with the party; it was apparently from a subsequent quest. This is a bit of continuity that didn't fully make sense to me.
As she works, along with a dwarf woman who she caught attempting to rob the tavern, to tidy the place up and bring in more clientele as a cover for plotting to get her book back, she discovers that she likes it here and likes doing this and is making friends. But then the past comes back to bite her, and there's a confrontation, in which one of my not-favourite tropes occurs. (view spoiler)
Before I proceed to more critique, I want to say that I did enjoy this considerably. The worldbuilding, while off-the-shelf, felt a lot less like scenery flats than in some other books in the genre, the plot mostly made sense and progressed organically, the characters felt like they belonged in their world rather than ours (although with some up-to-date attitudes that are de rigueur in the genre), and the wee beastie - a stoat, not a racoon as per the blurb - was endearing. It managed to sit firmly in its subgenre without just being made from box mix, and shows decent writing ability.
The stove pinged my worldbuilding geekery briefly, though. Both the oven and a "burner" on the stove get "turned off," implying that this isn't a coal or woodburning range but (probably) gas. Where is the gas coming from? It's not magic, because in this setting magic has become relatively uncommon, after the teaching of magic was forbidden some decades previously. It just seemed not to fit well with the general tech level.
The editing is just a little scruffy, too. Most of the issues are with commas where they shouldn't be, and most of those are between adjectives that are not coordinate, but lots of people make that mistake. Most of the other commas where they shouldn't be are after "of course" when it's just confirming a previous statement; word processor grammar checkers are not sophisticated enough to distinguish that from the case where you do need a comma, because you're providing completely new information. Apart from these usage issues, though, there are a number of words that are either mistyped or not typed at all, and therefore missing from the sentences that require them. I've seen plenty of books far worse than this, and I didn't spot any vocabulary being used incorrectly, but it has room for improvement.
The other thing that I wasn't completely sold on was the rapid progression of a couple of romances, one of which hit marriage and the other moving in together after about a month of dating in both cases. And in the case of the second one, it was between people who hadn't known each other long or very well before they started dating (I may as well call it that, because even though that's not a concept that was around in the time periods of our world that sword & sorcery approximately evokes, relationships in this book's world follow modern practice). There was no plot reason for it to be only a month, either; it could have been longer. I won't give it my "weak-romance" tag, because that's for people who decide to get married after barely spending any time together, and this isn't that, but it does seem precipitate.
So there are ways in which it could be better (from my point of view; some or all of these things may not bother you whatsoever), but I liked it, and want to continue with the series.
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