Murder from Scratch
A Sally Solari Mystery
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Restaurateur Sally Solari’s cousin Evelyn may be blind, but she can see all too clearly that her chef mother’s death wasn’t an accidental overdose—she was murdered.
Santa Cruz restaurateur Sally Solari’s life is already boiling over as she deals with irate cooks and other staffing issues at the busy Gauguin restaurant. The rainy December weather isn’t cooling things down, either. So she’s steamed when her dad persuades her to take in Evelyn, her estranged blind cousin whose mother has just died of a drug overdose.
But Evelyn proves to be lots of fun and she’s a terrific cook. Back at the house she’d shared with her mom, Evelyn’s heightened sense of touch tells her that various objects—a bottle of cranberry juice, her grandfather’s jazz records—are out of place. She and her mom always kept things in the same place so Evelyn could find them. So she suspects that her mother’s death was neither accident nor suicide, no matter what the police believe.
The cousins’ sleuthing takes Sally and Evelyn into the world of macho commercial kitchens, and the cutthroat competitiveness that can flame up between chefs. In Leslie Karst’s scrumptious fourth Sally Solari mystery, Sally will have to chop a long list of suspects down to size or end up getting burned.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Competition can be murder, as Sally Solari, the owner of a French-Polynesian restaurant in Santa Cruz, Calif., can attest, in Karst's lively fourth series whodunit (after 2018's Death Al Fresco). Sally's dad, Mario, has his own Italian seafood place, and a cousin of Mario's, Jackie Olivieri, recently left a restaurant called Tamarind to open her own pop-up, the Curry Leaf, with a similar menu to Tamarind's. When Evelyn, Jackie's college-age daughter, finds Jackie dead, Mario convinces Sally to take in Evelyn while her home is cordoned off as a potential crime scene. Though Jackie long ago broke ties with the Solaris, and Sally has never met Evelyn, nothing trumps famiglia. A farewell note to Evelyn found near the victim's body suggests to Detective Vargas that Jackie took a lethal dose of pills, but Evelyn swears he's wrong, and she and Sally set out to prove it. Suspects include Rachel, who was fired from the Curry Leaf and now is starting her own pop-up, and Al, Tamarind's volatile owner, who lays claim to all of Jackie's recipes. This is cover-to-cover fun for culinary cozy fans.
