Bayou Book Thief (A Vintage Cookbook Mystery, Band 1) - Softcover

Byron, Ellen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593437616 ISBN 13: 9780593437612

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

A fantastic new cozy mystery series with a vintage flair from USA Today bestselling and Agatha Award–winning author Ellen Byron.

Twenty-eight-year-old widow Ricki James leaves Los Angeles to start a new life in New Orleans after her showboating actor husband perishes doing a stupid internet stunt. The Big Easy is where she was born and adopted by the NICU nurse who cared for her after Ricki’s teen mother disappeared from the hospital.
 
Ricki’s dream comes true when she joins the quirky staff of Bon Vee Culinary House Museum, the spectacular former Garden District home of late bon vivant Genevieve “Vee” Charbonnet, the city’s legendary restauranteur. Ricki is excited about turning her avocation – collecting vintage cookbooks – into a vocation by launching the museum’s gift shop, Miss Vee’s Vintage Cookbooks and Kitchenware. Then she discovers that a box of donated vintage cookbooks contains the body of a cantankerous Bon Vee employee who was fired after being exposed as a book thief.
 
The skills Ricki has developed ferreting out hidden vintage treasures come in handy for investigations. But both her business and Bon Vee could wind up as deadstock when Ricki’s past as curator of a billionaire’s first edition collection comes back to haunt her.
 
Will Miss Vee’s Vintage Cookbooks and Kitchenware be a success … or a recipe for disaster?
 

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ellen’s Cajun Country Mysteries have won the Agatha Award for Best Contemporary Novel and multiple Lefty Awards for Best Humorous Mystery. Bayou Book Thief will be the first book in her new Vintage Cookbook Mysteries. She also writes the Catering Hall Mystery series under the name Maria DiRico.  
 
Ellen is an award-winning playwright, and non-award-winning TV writer of comedies like Wings, Just Shoot Me, and Fairly Odd Parents. She has written over two hundred articles for national magazines but considers her most impressive credit working as a cater-waiter for Martha Stewart. An alum of New Orleans’ Tulane University, she blogs with Chicks on the Case, is a lifetime member of the Writers Guild of America, and will be the 2023 Left Coast Crime Toastmaster. 
 

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

One

 

In some cities, a middle-aged woman dancing down the street dressed as a cross between a 1970s disco queen and Wilma Flintstone would be unusual. But this was New Orleans, where the unusual was the everyday.

 

The woman dancing past Ricki James-Diaz, dodging the broken concrete in the Irish Channel's worn sidewalks, happened to be her landlady, Kitty Kat Rousseau, who lived on the other side of Ricki's rented double-shotgun cottage on Odile Street. "On your way to a rehearsal?" Ricki called to Kitty from the porch. Kitty belonged to the ABBA Dabba Do's, one of the Crescent City's many synchronized dance and marching troupes that entertained at parades and special events.

 

"You know it, chère." Kitty did the hustle, then paused. "Whew, spinning made me dizzy." She leaned against a lamppost, trying to regain her equilibrium. "I'm glad you caught me. I wanted to wish you good luck today."

 

Ricki used the back of her hand to wipe a drip of perspiration from her forehead, the result of nerves, not the mid-August heat. "Thank you so much."

 

"You nervous?"

 

"Yes," Ricki admitted.

 

"Don't be. I'm gonna stop by Holy Name and say a prayer you sell your idea." Kitty blew Ricki a kiss. She hopped into her purple sedan and slowly drove away, maneuvering down the old streets at what an amused Ricki liked to call "parade speed."

 

Ricki turned and went inside, walking through her living room, bedroom, and kitchen to the bathroom. The mid-nineteenth-century home had earned its "shotgun" sobriquet because it was said if you fired a shot from the front door, it would fly a straight path right out the back door. Why being able to fire off a shot like that might be necessary at any point in time was unclear, but the home was the perfect size for a twenty-eight-year-old widow eager to put some questionable past decisions behind her and make a fresh start.

 

She retrieved a yoga mat from a shelf in the cabinet where she stored towels and returned to the living room. After a quick check for cockroaches, the state bug of Louisiana, she unrolled the mat and went through a fifteen-minute combination of yoga, breathing exercises, and meditation. Mellowed by the soothing routine, she showered and then towel dried her hair, having never mastered the art of blow-drying her mass of light brown curls. She applied a touch of understated makeup, adding olive liner that brought out the unique ring of yellow in her hazel-green eyes and complemented her tawny complexion. Rather than dress in her usual California laid-back look of comfy tops and yoga pants or thrift store finds, she slipped on a teal cotton A-line dress and black pumps. Ricki figured the conservative outfit was a safe choice for a meeting with Eugenia Charbonnet Felice, president of the Bon Vee Foundation board. The New Orleans aristocrat was the brains behind opening the home of her late aunt, legendary restaurateur Genevieve "Vee" Charbonnet, to the public as the Bon Vee Culinary House Museum.

 

Ricki gave herself a quick once-over in the bedroom's tarnished full-length mirror. She checked her giant tote bag to make sure she had everything she needed for her presentation. Deciding the bag was too heavy, she extricated a wheeled carry-on bag from behind a stack of unpacked boxes and transferred the tote's contents into it: laptop, leather portfolio case, a Depression-era can opener, and several vintage cookbooks ranging in decades from the Roaring Twenties to the Swingin' Sixties. Everything Ricki needed to pitch her idea for running the gift shop at Bon Vee, which she planned to name Miss Vee's Vintage Cookbook and Kitchenware Shop.

 

Ricki headed out the door, fighting to keep her balance in heels she wasn't used to wearing. Her first stop was at Peli Deli, nestled inside one of New Orleans's picturesque corner storefronts in her Irish Channel neighborhood. An exceptionally tall, thin man somewhere in his thirties and dressed like an old-timey undertaker stood outside the building lecturing a group of weary tourists, as he did almost every day. "You may wonder why we've wandered so far from the haunted sites of the Lower Garden District," he opined in a sepulchral voice.

 

"He got that right," a sweaty man wearing an Ohio State T-shirt muttered to the woman next to him, who gave a vigorous nod of agreement.

 

"You must trust me when I say that this is one of the most haunted locations in all of New Orleans, and one you won't get to visit with any other tour group."

 

"Hi, Mordant," Ricki said to the tour guide. She walked past him and pulled open the shop's door.

 

"Hi, Ricki," he responded in a normal voice. "Tell Zellah I say hey."

 

"Will do."

 

Ricki stepped into the shop, whose comfortably worn wooden floor and shelves spoke to a century-plus of customers. In the middle of the store, a young woman about Ricki's age put the finishing touches on a mountainous display of Creole and Cajun seasonings. Her black-and-red braids were piled high in a bun, her eyelids and the area around her eyes intricately painted to resemble monarch butterfly wings, which seemed to float against her dark skin. She wore green leggings and a loose top splashed with bright flowers, making her resemble a bouquet where a butterfly had alighted. She noticed Ricki and smiled. "Hey."

 

"Hey. Is the craft kit ready?"

 

"You betcha." Zellah Batiste crooked a finger and beckoned Ricki. "Suivez-moi."

 

"Yes, ma'am." Ricki accompanied this with a mock salute. When Ricki first met Zellah, the deli employee-slash-artist explained her name meant "one who knows the path; lacking nothing." Zellah joked it was wishful thinking on her parents' part, but in the brief time Ricki had known her, she'd found the name pretty much on the mark. Ricki valued and sometimes envied her new friend's talent and serene self-assurance.

 

She followed her to the back of the store, where a sign reading "Create" stood over a doorway festooned with a curtain of colorful beads. They stepped through the beads into Zellah's special space, an outlet for the artistic talent she balanced with her work in the family deli business. A table displayed a range of kits for sale, from origami to airplane models to needlepoint. "I came up with something for the kiddies." Zellah handed Ricki a ziplock bag containing crayons and a coloring book whose cover showed a rainbow comprised of vegetables drawn in a midcentury style.

 

Ricki took the coloring book and thumbed through it, admiring the black-and-white illustrations. "This is so nineteen fifties. I don't know who'll love it more, the kids or their parents. You're a genius, Z."

 

"You're the genius. You've got a winner of an idea on your hands, muh friend."

 

"Here's hoping the Bon Vee Foundation president thinks so."

 

"If she doesn't, she's ba-nah-nas."

 

The women exited the craft shop. "I better get going," Ricki said. "By the way, Mordant is outside. He says hey."

 

Zellah chortled. "Of course he is. Of course he does."

 

"He's a man in love," Ricki teased. "He'll make up any story that gives him an excuse to drag his poor tourists this way so he can see you."

 

"I know," Zellah said. "The only thing haunted in this old wreck is the ancient plumbing and wiring." A filament lightbulb flickered, popped, and blew out as if to prove her point. "There goes another one," she said with a sigh. "As long as Mordant keeps bringing his guests inside for snacks and souvenir shopping, I don't care if he tells them I'm a ghost myself....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593437616
• ISBN 13: 9780593437612
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland