Published: 13 March 2025 (print)/ 13 March 2025 (audio) 
Publisher: HarperCollins/HarperCollins
Pages: 384/9 hrs and 3 mins
Narrator: Regina Reagan
Format: Audiobook
Genre: Romance
★ – 1.5 Stars
As a renowned chef, single-dad Archer never planned on moving to a small town, let alone running a pancake restaurant. But Dream Harbor needs a new chef, and Archer needs a community to help raise his daughter, Olive.
Iris has never managed to hold down a job for more than a few months. So when Mayor Kelly suggests Archer is looking for a nanny, and Iris might be available, she shudders at the thought. But in need of money she reluctantly agrees.
As Archer and Iris get used to their new roles, is it possible that they might have more in common than they first thought, or is Olive just determined to play match-maker…
This is definitely the last book of this series I’ll be reading. I wanted to stop about 10% of the way through but I decided the finish, if only to see it got as bad and as stupid as I thought. I had been committed to finishing the series, branching out my reading – especially in the romance department – but I might need to be more selective in the future.
From the start it’s like the romances where a completely single, clueless man is suddenly a father. If the choices are a grandmother who has been in the kid’s life or a random stranger why not make the random man take over? Why would you leave your kid with a short fling and not an actual relative or friend you know? You have no knowledge of what kind of father he’ll be? At least it happens right away so you know what you’re getting into with this romance. It even references the single dad tropes which felt too on the nose.
Archer is definitely the one with a chip on his shoulder. He creates the tension because he doesn’t want to be there and it is affecting everyone around him. He almost terminates Iris’ job because he can’t keep it in his pants. At least Iris calls the guy out for his behaviour. I didn’t quite mind he changed his tune. Realising his work/life balance needed adjusting was reasonable, doing a 180 on everything he ever wanted in his life is not.
After having an issue with a three year age gap in a previous book, now we have to contend with there being an issue of only one bathroom and the fact their rooms are across the hall from one another. Did they need a wider gap between their rooms? Have these people never lived in a regular sized house where one bathroom is the norm? Did one of them need to live in the backyard? Clearly these people need one floor and one bathroom for each member of the household. “Bathing in the same room” is not an issue. Unless you are doing it together, this is not a thing reasonable people think about.
Thank god we had the mystery of the pancakes to sustain us. Unlike the other books where there was no mystery despite the claim, the battle to get the recipe right was actually in the plot, actually a part of the plot, and actually had a satisfying conclusion. It is the only reason I kept going, even if I was going at 4x speed by the end and skipping chunks by the final hour or two.
The explicit scenes are minimal unlike previous books. The majority of the book is the two characters trying to avoid sleeping with each other out of professional ethics and the child, so that at least allowed more plot to be written. Didn’t stop the character thoughts though. Perpetually horny which felt over the top and unrealistic, especially as it was constantly mentioned.
The characters have no depth. It’s all surface level explained on the page stuff. It’s hard to believe a story that had real character depth in book one could have something so bland and unappealing in subsequent books. If each book if capable of being read individually, heaven help those who don’t know the backstories of these characters because without knowing about the mayor and the friends from previous books it’s all useless because they are names only. You have no idea who these people are.
Overall it was boring. It was nothing. I hated how Iris completely changes what she wants to get the happily ever after ending. Liking Olive, as Iris said frequently, was different to wanting her own kids and wanting to be pregnant. Skip to the final pages and boom, change of heart. It went against everything the book built up.
Without being too disparaging (I am trying to be reasonable), I can see why it’s a tiktok book/series. It is simple, easy, full of sexy scenes and easy to digest characters. But the lack of real plot and substance makes it lacking. They are the same simple formula over and over and while at the start it looked like there would be variety in the locations and the characters, Gilmore has given up as the series goes on as the characters become less dimensional and fulfilled. They are driven by their emotions and that is the only real development they get.
Despite my plan to continue with the series this is a big nope for me. I am out. They had been getting progressively worse reads as they went on and I have enough on my TBR I want to read than finishing a series I only started because of a pretty book cover and the (deceitful) lure of a cosy town mystery.
You can purchase The Strawberry Patch Pancake House via the following
Wordery | Blackwell’s | Angus & Robertson
Fishpond | Amazon | Amazon Aust | Audible
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Cotswolds inhabitants are used to inclement weather, but the night sky is especially foggy as Rory and Molly Devere, the new vicar and his wife, drive slowly home from a dinner party in their village of Sumpton Harcourt. They strain to see the road ahead―and then suddenly brake, screeching to a halt. Right in front of them, aglow in the headlights, a body hangs from a gnarled tree at the edge of town. Margaret Darby, an elderly spinster, has been murdered―and the villagers are bewildered as to who would commit such a crime.
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