Ruby does her part by agreeing to have her bagel shop sponsor the baseball team, but Essie Sue, as usual, manages to extract more than her pound of flesh. Now Ruby finds herself involved in the planning of the Sear, to be held at the nearby reducing resort, The Fit and Rural Reducing Ranch, and something else that is becoming all to commonplace to Ruby - investigating a murder.

Baseball team coach and Essie Sue's personal trainee, Bogie, is found dead in the batting cages. Somehow, although this is never really made clear why, Ruby finds herself making casual inquiries about what occurred. Now she is looking very hard at The Reducing Ranch, a place at which she had hoped to do some computer consulting. There are some strange staff members and inconsistencies. Ruby cannot seem to connect all the dots, but she knows she had better hurry since the spiritual healer of the ranch plans to marry the temple's rabbi, whom Ruby suspects almost died from supplements filched from the ranch.

Never Nosh a Matzo Ball is a funny entertaining mystery but it has so many interconnected elements going on it seems very confused and unfocused. The purpose of the baseball team as a plot element is never realized and seems unnecessary since Bogie was connected to the major players in so many other ways.

Ruby tries to be a good sport about many things and more often than not, she ends up looking like a pushover. She knows that Essie Sue is pushy, domineering, yet she lets her get the best of her over and over. Rabbi Kevin is not much better, as he allows even his office décor to be dictated by this overbearing woman.

The mystery is very obvious, leaving readers to wonder why police detective Paul Lundy hasn't put everything together, especially since the things Ruby digs up would not be too hard to figure out. An email pal, Nan, that Ruby bounces ideas off of, is explained quickly (she helped Ruby solve her husband's murder in Fax Me a Bagel), but doesn't seem to do much to move the plot along.

Nonetheless, Ruby is an entertaining character and there are times when Essie Sue is more amusing than annoying. Ruby has two possible love interests, but seems to have settled comfortably into her life as a widow with her three-legged dog, Oy Vey.

--Jennifer Monahan Winberry