The Recipe Notebooks

A dead lawyer in the dunes. A patent worth four hundred million dollars. And a stack of handwritten recipe notebooks that were never really about food. The second short mystery in The Marjorie Corey Files.

A year after the events that changed everything, the Ginger Mae Coffee Shop is open again on Patchogu Island, and Victoria has set out a small memorial: Grandma Knapp's old recipe notebooks, under glass behind the counter. So when a visiting pharmaceutical scientist stops cold at the display, quietly photographs three pages, and hurries out the door, Victoria notices.

The next week a retired patent lawyer checks into the island bed and breakfast, asks whether the Ginger Mae is still open, and turns up dead in the south dunes on a Thursday morning. Cardiac arrest, the medical examiner says. He was a healthy man. His laptop is gone. His briefcase has been opened and repacked by someone who was not him.

When the women finally open the old fireproof safe, they find three of the notebooks are written in Grandma's hand but in no recipe anyone could cook. The quantities are in milligrams. The instructions are a code. And it falls to Solei, with her scientist's eye, to read what an old chemist hid inside a grandmother's kitchen, why a corporation would kill to bury it, and what Grandma Knapp quietly held over a dangerous organization for thirty years.

THE RECIPE NOTEBOOKS is Book Two of The Marjorie Corey Files, a complete series of warmly atmospheric island mysteries. Each book stands on its own and opens one more drawer in the life of the woman who left the shop behind. For readers of Richard Osman, Ann Cleeves, and Jacqueline Winspear.

Warm, clever, and quietly serious about the things people protect.