Just Finished Reading Fit to Die by Ellery Adams

Ellery Adams is the pen name of prolific cozy mystery novel writer Jennifer, or "J.B." Stanley, who has produced a number of series of different-themed books since 2006.  One of her earliest is the Supper Club Mysteries...I just finished reading the second installment, from 2007, titled Fit to Die.  As in the opening book, Carbs and Cadavers, the setting is the fictional west Virginia town of Quincy's Gap as James Henry, a former college literature professor and now head of the area's public library, finds himself in need of shedding a few pounds due primarily to overeating...especially those pesky cheese puffs he just can't seem to resist.  He befriends a circle of like-minded people, and they create an informal group called the Supper Club in which they encourage one another with their eating habits...not easy to do when temptation is all around!  In Fit to Die, two opposites spring up suddenly in the form of two businesses.  One is an ice cream shop and the other is a fitness studio...their owners, respectively Willy and Ronnie, both have their appeal to James and his friends...but one night Willy's store burns down, with a fatality, which is attributed to accident although the circumstances seem suspicious.  As for Ronnie Levitt, her enthusiasm and energy convince the Supper Club to join her program, which is a mixture of purchasing special meals, abstaining from the "bad" stuff like sweets and fats, and painfully exercising their buns off.  The author's descriptions of their travails in this regard are both funny and sad...the latter because I, too, tend to go for foods that tend to lean to the "junk" side.  As in the first novel, this one contains a murder mystery that gets satisfactorily solved at the end.  Add to this the subplots of James' slowly developing romance with Lucy, another Club member, her attempts to get promoted within the police department, and the emergence from bitterness of his widowed father Jackson, and you have a good formula for a developing series with compelling characters.  Also, Ellery Adams has a penchant for hilarious book titles...the next one in this series is Chili Con Corpses...