The Satanic Mechanic
A Tannie Maria Mystery
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4.1 • 9 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Now an Acorn Original TV Series Starring Maria Doyle Kennedy, Kylie Fisher, and Tony Kgoroge
Tannie Maria, our crime-fighting, food-loving heroine, returns to solve another delicious caper: the mystery of her own romantic future
Tannie Maria--recipe writer turned crime fighter--barely has time to return to her cooking and advice column for the local Gazette when she finds herself embroiled in another whodunnit--Slimkat the Bushman’s life is being threatened, and Tannie Maria is determined to find out who wants to kill him. The nature reserve beside the Kuruman River has been awarded as ancestral land to the Bushmen, also known as the San people, and a host of greedy parties, like diamond miners and cattle companies, are willing to do whatever it takes to keep them from claiming it.
Add to the mix that Tannie Maria is also trying to overcome her own hangups in love with her boyfriend, the rugged detective Lieutenant Henk Kannymeyer, and--for the first time in her life--to go on a diet, there is no shortage of conundrums personal and professional for an amateur sleuth to confront in this delightful, warm-hearted sequel to Sally Andrew’s Recipes for Love and Murder, one of O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE’s Books To Start 2016 Right.”
Blending a madcap mystery with lovable characters, in the beautiful setting of South Africa’s rural Klein Karoo, Sally Andrew really does have the perfect recipe for a crime series.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Food heals, arouses, coerces, and kills in Andrew's sublime second psychological cozy featuring South African agony aunt Tannie Maria van Harte (after 2015's Recipes for Love and Murder), which also offers an immersion course in a polyglot post-Apartheid culture. Afrikaans and Xhosa spice the luminous English sentences; skin is just another detail. Still, old grudges survive. When Bushman leader Slimkat is poisoned with honey-mustard sauce on the kudu kebabs, Maria suspects the white cattle baron whose land the Supreme Court awarded to Slimkat's people. Hunky cop Hank Kannemeyer fears losing Maria and demands she quit sleuthing, but he needs her forensic taste buds. Another murder at an exotic PTSD workshop, which Maria's attending because of her guilt over her abusive husband's death, quashes her thrumming desire for Henk. Tannie Maria's authentic recipes, for which Andrew credits many sources, are easy to make far from the veldt. Her food wisdom is universal, unassailable: potato salad eases worry; warm orange pudding makes one feel whole.
