French Quarter Fright Night (Vintage Cookbook) by Ellen Byron
About French Quarter Fright Night
French Quarter Fright Night (Vintage Cookbook) Cozy Mystery 3rd in Series Setting – the Garden District of New Orleans Publisher : Severn House (September 3, 2024) Hardcover : 256 pages ISBN-10 : 1448312655 ISBN-13 : 978-1448312658 Digital ASIN : B0CTHQXNM5
The third in the fabulous cozy mystery series with a vintage flair from USA Today bestselling and Agatha Award-winning author Ellen Byron.
Welcome to the Bon Veeevil Festival of Fear! Prepare for the spookiest night of your life . . .
It’s Halloween in New Orleans, and the staff of Bon Vee Culinary House Museum is setting up a fantastic haunted house tour for their visitors. But when flashy movie star Blaine Taggart and his entourage move into the mansion next door, gift shop proprietor Ricki James-Diaz gets a fright of her own.
While Ricki is excited about the potential business the tours will bring to her vintage cookbook shop, she’s less thrilled by former friend Blaine’s arrival in town. Then Bon Vee’s prop tomb becomes a real tomb for Blaine’s nasty assistant, and suddenly everyone at Bon Vee is a murder suspect. There isn’t a ghost of a chance one of them committed the crime, but with NOPD busy tackling the mischief and mayhem generated by the spooky holiday, it falls on Ricki and her friends to catch the killer.
As the Big Easy gears up for the Big Scary, it seems everyone has skeletons in their closets. Can Ricki reveal the shadowy killer before someone else becomes part of the Halloween horror show?
About Ellen Byron
Ellen is a USA Today bestselling author, Anthony nominee, and recipient of multiple Agatha and Lefty awards for her Cajun Country Mysteries, Vintage Cookbook Mysteries, and Catering Hall Mysteries (as Maria DiRico). Her new series, The Golden Motel Mysteries, recently debuted. She is also an award-winning playwright and non-award-winning writer of TV hits like Wings, Just Shoot Me, and Fairly OddParents, but considers her most impressive achievement working as a cater-waiter for Martha Stewart. Visit her at Cozy Mysteries | Ellen Byron | Author
I am so happy to be back in Collier with Bet and the rest of the gang. Bet has been Sheriff of Collier for a year now. I think we are in for a chilling time in the Cascade Mountain Range of Washington State. It’s winter time and the storm of the century is heading their way.
Seeing Collier is a small town, it has a small police force. Bet’s the Sheriff, Clayton is her right hand man, and Alma is the glue that holds them all together. Bet is the first line of defense against disaster and most likely the last line too. She could use another man and Kane is in need of job. He’s qualified and I liked him right away.
We start out with a snow machine death and the Lakers, hometown folks, spin out of control. It’s hard to figure out who is doing what to who, but that is common for an Elena Taylor book.
The Colliers had founded the coal mining town and could Rob be a love interest for Bet? We shall see in future books in the Sheriff Bet Rivers series.
I love Shweitzer and Grizzly, the critters who add a certain something something to the story.
The avalanche…I had my heart in my throat for a moment or two.
We have so many suspects and so much action going on, at times my head was spinning. Elena Taylor does not make it easy to figure out who is doing what to whom and why they are doing it. She kept my interest from beginning to end.
I voluntarily reviewed a free copy of A Cold Cold World by Elena Taylor.
A female sheriff tries to fill her late father’s boots and be the sheriff her small Washington State mountain town needs as a deadly snow storm engulfs the town, in this dark, twisty mystery.
The world felt pure. Nature made the location pristine again, hiding the scene from prying eyes. As if no one had died there at all.
In the months since Bet Rivers solved her first murder investigation and secured the sheriff’s seat in Collier, she’s remained determined to keep her town safe. With a massive snowstorm looming, it’s more important than ever that she stays vigilant.
When Bet gets a call that a family of tourists has stumbled across a teen injured in a snowmobile accident on a mountain ridge, she braves the storm to investigate. However, once she arrives at the scene of the accident it’s clear to Bet that the teen is not injured; he’s dead. And has been for some time . . .
Investigating a possible homicide is hard enough, but with the worst snowstorm the valley has seen in years threatening the safety of her town, not to mention the integrity of her crime scenes – as they seem to be mounting up as well – Bet has to move fast to uncover the complicated truth and prove that she’s worthy of keeping her father’s badge.
Praise for A Cold, Cold World:
“Readers who appreciate the strong woman police chief in Linda Castillo’s Kate Burkholder books or the vivid landscapes of Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire mysteries will appreciate Taylor’s riveting crime novel.” ~ Lesa Holstine, Library Journal Starred Review
“Taylor perfectly captures the tension and determination of a small town sheriff facing down an isolating blizzard while racing against the clock to solve a murder and save a missing child. Sheriff Bet Rivers will be your new favorite character” ~ Lisa Gardner, #1 New York Times bestselling author
“A terrific ensemble cast in a total immersion setting! Fans of CJ Box and Julia Spencer-Fleming will adore this novel – it’s whipsmart, completely cinematic, and full of heart. Not to be missed!” ~ Hank Phillippi Ryan, USA Today bestselling author of One Wrong Word
“Sheriff Bet Rivers is back with a suspenseful and shrewdly plotted story of deadly small town secrets . . . Think Longmire meets Yellowstone” ~ James L’Etoile, award winning author of Dead Drop and Face of Greed
“Tense and divinely atmospheric, this is the perfect book to curl up with on a cold winter’s day” ~ J.L. Delozier, author of the multi-award-winning mystery, The Photo Thief
A Cold, Cold World Trailer:
Book Details:
Genre: Police Procedural, Mystery Published by: Severn House Publication Date: August 6, 2024 Number of Pages: 256 ISBN: 9781448314065 (ISBN10: 1448314062) Series: A Sheriff Bet Rivers Mystery, Book 2 | Each is a Stand-Alone Mystery Book Links:Amazon | Barnes & Noble | BookShop.org | Goodreads | Severn House
Read an excerpt:
ONE
Bet Rivers sat in the sheriff’s station and watched the radar on her computer screen turn a darker and darker blue. Snow headed for the little town of Collier and keeping everyone safe was her responsibility. Bet’s advancement to sheriff had taken place less than a year ago, but the name Rivers had followed ‘Sheriff’ all the way back to the founding of the town. None of the previous Sheriff Rivers, her father included, ever failed the community, and she didn’t plan to be the first. With her father’s death last fall, Collier residents were the closest thing she had to family.
The valley Bet protected sat high in the Cascade Mountain Range of Washington State. Winter storms often dropped a couple inches of snow at once, a situation Collier could handle, and winter had been relatively mild so far. February, however, was shaping up into something else.
This morning, nearby Lake Collier – a dark and dangerous body of water the locals respected from a safe distance – started freezing completely over for the first time in years.
Bet couldn’t remember such a large storm ever bearing down on the valley. The weather was determined to test her in ways that patrolling the streets of Los Angeles and her short stint as sheriff had not yet done.
Clicking off the weather radar screen and opening another file, Bet read over her severe winter storm checklist. Snowplow – ready to go. Volunteers with tractors and trucks with snowplow attachments – set. The community center would be open twenty-four hours a day in case the town’s power went out and people needed a warm place to go. Donna, the elementary school nurse, was on hand for minor health emergencies. She would be staying at the center twenty-four seven until the storm passed.
Most residents owned generators and a lot of people used fireplaces for heat, but the community center provided a central location for anyone in trouble.
Nothing like living in an isolated mountain valley to make folks respect what Mother Nature hurled at them – and rely on each other, rather than the outside world. A lot of people would look to the sheriff as a leader. She couldn’t let them down.
Bet turned her attention to the pile of pink ‘while you were out’ notes that Alma still loved to use rather than sending information to Bet digitally. Alma was much more than an office manager, but she also fought certain modern conveniences.
Most of the notes were mundane issues that Alma could handle, but the last in the pile was a call from Jamie Garcia, a local reporter trying to get back into Bet’s good graces after an incident a few months ago had cost her Bet’s trust.
Wants to chat about the possibility of an increase in drug use in the area, the note read. Specifically – meth.
That would definitely have to wait. It crossed Bet’s mind that Jamie might exaggerate the situation just to have reason to touch base with her, but Bet taped it to the computer monitor to follow up on after the storm passed. Her valley didn’t have the kind of drug problems as many other communities, and Bet wanted to see it stay that way. If Jamie had any information on a rise in illegal activity, that could be useful.
The rest of the notes she would return to Alma to deal with. Right now, weathering the tempest would take all of Bet’s resources.
Bringing up the radar one more time, Bet’s stomach clenched as she tracked the monster storm. What if she made a decision during this event that hurt her entire community? Confidence didn’t make responsibility lighter to bear, and the hot, sunny streets of Los Angeles hadn’t prepared her for one thousand residents slowly buried under several feet of snow. They were a long way from the plowed highways and larger cities with fully functional hospitals.
Bet was the first line of defense against disaster.
She was also likely the last line of defense. Once they were snowed in, she couldn’t bring help in from the outside.
A year ago, she had been poised to take the detective’s exam in Los Angeles. Her goal was a long and successful career in the nation’s largest police force. But events outside her control got in the way, and now she was back in Collier, trying to fill her father’s large, all-too-recently vacated shoes.
She faced a once-in-a-century storm with her lone deputy, a septuagenarian secretary, and one very big dog.
Her first instinct was to talk to her father, but his death prevented her from ever gaining new insight into his expertise. Her second instinct was to contact Sergeant Magdalena Carrera. Maggie had mentored Bet during her time at the LAPD.
‘We chicas need to stick together,’ she’d said to Bet early on in her career, back when Bet still called her sergeant.
But as good as Maggie was at her job, Bet doubted she’d have much advice about facing a blizzard.
‘It’s up to us, Schweitzer,’ Bet said to the Anatolian shepherd sitting in her doorway. ‘As long as no one has a heart attack after the storm hits, we’ll be fine.’ Schweitzer had a look on his face like he knew what was coming. He always could read her mood, not to mention the weather, and he’d been edgy all morning.
She had learned to read his mood too, and right now it wasn’t good.
‘It’s going to be all right, Schweitz.’ It surprised her to realize she believed her own words. She could handle this.
Lakers – residents proudly took the nickname from their mysterious lake – could hunker down in their valley and survive on their own. Everyone in town knew that if snow blocked them in and a helicopter couldn’t fly, they had no access to a hospital. But Donna was good at her job too. Plus, it would only be for a couple of days.
The phone on her desk rang, jarring her from her thoughts.
As long as the ring didn’t herald an emergency, everything would be fine.
Bet rolled out in her black and white on the long teardrop of road that circled the valley. She didn’t turn on her siren; there wasn’t anyone on the loop to warn of her approach and the sound felt too loud, like a scream into the colorless void. The emergency lights on top of her SUV stained the white unmarked fields of snow on either side red, then blue, then red again, like blood streaking the ground. Her studded tires roared on the hard-packed snow, the surface easy to navigate – at least for now.
The drive to Jeb Pearson’s place took less than twenty minutes, even with the worsening conditions. Pearson’s Ranch sat at the end of the valley farthest from the lake and the town center. The ranch occupied an area the locals called the ‘Train Yard’, though that name didn’t show up on any official maps.
Long ago, the roundhouse for the Colliers’ private railway perched there at the end of the tracks. The roundhouse was a huge, wedge-shaped brick structure, like one third of a pie with the tips of the slices bitten off. It was built to house the big steam engines owned by the Colliers. The facility could hold five engines, each pulled inside through giant glass and iron doors. Engines could be parked and serviced inside the roundhouse, while an enormous turntable sat out front to spin the engines around, sending them down different tracks in order to pass each other in opposite directions.
It was unlikely the Colliers ever housed five engines up here all at once, but they owned other mines around the state and had used engines in other places. It must have been reassuring to know that if they ever needed to, they could bring their assets up here, protected in their high-elevation fiefdom.
Jeb used the property as a summer camp for boys who struggled with drug and alcohol addictions and guesthouses for snow adventure enthusiasts during the winter. Jeb lived there year-round, with a giant Newfoundland dog named Grizzly, a half a dozen horses, and one mini donkey named Dolly that helped him rehabilitate the boys.
Bet pulled up in front of the roundhouse. The cabins and other outbuildings stretched away from where she parked, with the barn the farthest from the road. The pastures were empty with the storm bearing down, the animals all safely tucked away in their stalls. Jeb stood out front with two bundled figures that must have been the father and son who were currently staying at his place. A third member of their party, the mother, was nowhere to be seen.
Bet got out of her vehicle and walked over to where two of Jeb’s snowmobiles were parked, running and ready to go. Layers of winter clothing padded Jeb’s wiry form, his face ruddy in the arctic wind.
‘What have we got, Jeb?’
‘Mark and Julia Crews and their son Jeremy came across what looks to be a solo wreck up on Iron Horse Ridge. They didn’t have any details about the driver’s condition, so I’m not sure what we’re looking at. The parents wanted to protect their son and got him out of there before he could see anything gruesome. These two came down to get me while Mrs Crews stayed with the injured rider.’
Bet nodded to the man standing a few feet away. Only part of his face was visible through the balaclava he wore. His eyes looked haunted.
‘You did the right thing,’ she said to him. ‘If the driver’s got a spinal injury, you could have done more damage than good trying to bring them down.’ She didn’t add that if the driver was dead there was nothing to be done except locate the next of kin.
‘Thanks, Sheriff,’ Mark Crews said, his voice shaky. ‘That was—’
Emotion cut off the man’s words. He reached for his son and pulled him close. The boy didn’t resist, but he also didn’t hug his father back. Bet considered checking the boy for shock, but guessed he was just a teen being a teen.
She gave Mark a nod and hoped the accident victim survived the wait – otherwise Mark Crews would always wonder if he should have made a different choice.
The father got his emotions under control and turned his attention back to Bet. ‘Please get my wife Julia down safely.’
Jeremy might be shocky, but the two people up on the ridge were her priority.
‘Always prioritize,’ Maggie said to Bet on a regular basis. ‘Don’t get caught up trying to fix everything at once. Fix the big things first.’
Her father would have agreed. His voice no longer took precedence in her mind, but his teachings never left her.
Bet promised to take care of Julia Crews and walked over to straddle the closest snowmobile. Pulling on the helmet she’d brought, she tucked her auburn curls out of the way before closing the face shield. Bet admired the Crews family for helping a stranger as the ominous storm bore down on the area. It must be terrifying to know Mrs Crews waited up on the ridge as the weather closed in. Bet was impressed the family put their own safety in jeopardy for someone they didn’t know. Not everyone would do that. It would have been easy enough to pretend they never found the accident, leaving the driver alone in the snow.
Jeb hopped on the other snowmobile, which was already set up to tow the Snowbulance – a small, enclosed trailer with a stretcher mounted inside. Bet made eye contact with Jeb to confirm she was ready, and they took off with him in the lead. Search-and-rescue was Jeb’s specialty, and he knew the terrain better than she did.
Her father Earle always said a good leader knew when to follow. Like most of her father’s advice, Bet knew it was true even if her instinct was never to admit someone else was the right person for a job she could do. In her defense, her father never faced life in law enforcement as a woman.
Maggie always said, ‘Never let a man think he’s got control. If you hand control over, he’ll never give it up.’
Bet wasn’t her father, but she wasn’t a patrol officer in LA, either. Sometimes neither Maggie’s nor her father’s advice was any help to her at all.
Not far from the ranch, Jeb turned off the main road and started up a forest service road that went west and north into the mountains. The turnoff wasn’t obvious, so it was interesting that the Crews had found that particular trail.
Snowmobiling was a popular sport in Collier and a lot of people used these forest service roads for trails, even the ones that were officially closed to traffic because there were no funds for maintenance. Without anyone to police the extensive system, the locals used them as their own private playground.
The roads connected in a complex web throughout the area. The injured teen could have arrived at the ridge from any direction. The forest was riddled with paths that the forest service no longer had the money or workforce to keep up, but people and animals kept cleared. In a lot of ways, the community benefited from the interlopers who cleared the roads, because that provided fire access into their local forest, which would otherwise become impassable through neglect.
If the brunt of the storm held off long enough for them to locate the scene of the accident and get the injured teen down the mountain before the conditions worsened, everything should still be all right.
Bet kept her focus on Jeb’s sled as they rode up the hill. The road turned dark as they got farther into the trees and the cloud cover grew almost black. She was glad for the headlight and someone she trusted to follow. At least in this moment, her father’s advice was right.
If only the injured rider survived the wait.
***
Excerpt from A Cold, Cold World by Elena Taylor. Copyright 2024 by Elena Taylor. Reproduced with permission from Elena Taylor. All rights reserved.
Author Bio:
Elena Taylor spent several years working in theater as a playwright, director, designer, and educator before turning her storytelling skills to fiction. Her first series, the Eddie Shoes Mysteries, written under the name Elena Hartwell, introduced a quirky mother/daughter crime fighting duo.
With the Bet Rivers Mysteries, Elena returns to her dramatic roots and brings readers much more serious and atmospheric novels. The series introduces Collier, Washington, with its dark and mysterious lake, tough-as-nails residents, and newly appointed sheriff with her sidekick Schweitzer, an Anatolian Shepherd.
Elena is also a senior editor with Allegory Editing, a developmental editing house, where she works one-on-one with writers to shape and polish manuscripts, short stories, and plays. If you’d like to work with Elena, visit www.allegoryediting.com.
Her favorite place to be is at Paradise, the property she and her hubby own south of Spokane, Washington. They live with their horses, dogs, and cats. Elena holds a B.A. from the University of San Diego, a M.Ed. from the University of Washington, Tacoma, and a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia.
Ancient Crete, 1450 BC. In a world of Goddess worship, sacred snakes and sacrifice, human jealousy, resentment, and betrayal still run wild . . .
When her sister Arge drops to the floor in convulsions and dies at her wedding, fifteen-year-old Martis, a young poet and bull leaper in training, is certain she was murdered. The prime suspect is the groom, Saurus, from the Greek mainland, but when Arge’s shade visits Martis, swearing Saurus is not the murderer, Martis vows to uncover the truth.
As Martis begins asking questions, she discovers that while Arge may have had no secrets, many of the people around her certainly do.
Praise for In the Shadow of the Bull:
“This complex, character-driven mystery is loaded with fascinating historical details” ~ Kirkus Reviews
Book Details:
Genre: Historical Mystery Published by: Severn House Publication Date: July 2023 Number of Pages: 224 ISBN: 9781448310869 (ISBN10: 1448310865) Series: An Ancient Crete Mystery (#1) Book Links:Amazon | Barnes & Noble | BookShop.org | Goodreads | Severn House
Read an excerpt:
Saurus was clad, not in a colorful loincloth, nor in the robe Cretan men wore for certain rituals, but in his leather armor. His wavy black hair spilled over his shoulders, un-oiled. And he carried his weapons, long knives in their scabbards, at his waist. His one attendant, his friend Kabya, stood behind him, dressed in like manner. Gasps of condemnation sounded through the crowd.
‘Does he think he’s going to fight someone,’ Mother said in angry disapproval.
Saurus looked around at the crowd, his eyes narrowed, and then he lifted his chin defiantly. Although I didn’t like him, I recognized his uncertainty. He knew we despised him and his barbarous ways.
When Saurus had first come to the palace, I’d been prepared to accept him. He knew my mother’s brother and had come with news of him. Like my uncle, Saurus was also a trader. At least he said he was, and we welcomed him into the house.
My dislike dated from that first day, before I knew he would take Arge from us. He examined me and my sisters with careless lechery. I’d just come from acrobatics and wore a boy’s loincloth. As his gaze swept over me, I shuddered with a strange prickly hot feeling. And then he dismissed me with a quick, indifferent turn of his head. Then the flush that burned through me was one of anger.
Despite my feelings, and his awkward broken Cretan, he’d quickly charmed all my sisters. And although Mother frequently eyed him with reserve, I saw them laughing together more than once.
At first, he’d spread his easy compliments among all my sisters – though I was invisible to him – but soon he paid more and more attention to Arge. A knot of worry formed on my mother’s forehead.
Several months after Saurus’s arrival, Arge announced she planned to marry him.
There was Arge now, in front of the mound of ash left by previous sacrifices. Against the deep purple of her jacket, her skin looked deathly pale. She’d pressed her mouth into a long thin line. Was she regretting her decision now? I looked up at the sky, so dark the stars spangled the expanse with flecks of silver, and sent another fervent prayer heavenward – ‘Please, Lady of the Animals and of Childbirth, stop this marriage. I will offer you all the honey from my bees.’
The High Priestess with her nine attendants suddenly appeared from the shadows, stepping through the trees into the torchlight. Their eyes sparkled and one of the attendants stumbled. They were drunk on the sacred liquor, a mixture of beer, wine, fermented honey and herbs. The priestesses wore the sacral knot tied at the nape of their necks, above the tight jackets. to show they were in service to Her who gave us life. Some of them wore doves on their heads, live doves tied to the headdress by the feet, for love. Three of the women carried baskets.
Instead of a dove, the High Priestess carried snakes in her headdress, living snakes that coiled as high as they could from the bindings, flicking their tongues and hissing. Snakes to promote fertility in this new marriage.
As the High Priestess approached the altar, a soft moan of anticipation whispered from the crowd. The goats began struggling even harder against their bonds as they caught the scent of the snakes. The Priestess, who did not seem to notice the throng of people standing on the other side of the altar of ash and bone, turned to the first attendant. She took away the lid and removed the large heavy snake from the basket to coil it around her waist. The remaining two baskets yielded additional snakes. Chanting sonorously, she allowed the snakes to twine up her arms.
I could not repress a tremor of remembered fear and my mother glanced at me. Only nine at Opis’s wedding, I’d been so terrified by the snakes that Arge had had to carry me from the ceremony. I looked at Arge now. Her expression was fixed in a grimace of pain.
Suddenly she fell to the floor, writhing in convulsions and spilling bloody vomit from her mouth.
For several seconds no one moved. The Priestess’s chant continued, then lurched to a stop mid-syllable. Pandemonium erupted. Screaming, Mother ran to her daughter and fell to her knees beside her. After a moment of frozen disbelief, Opis and Nuia followed at a run. I couldn’t move. I stared in horror at Arge’s body lying on the stones. What had I done? I’d pleaded with the Goddess to halt the wedding and She had. But why this way? Why kill Arge, the sweetest and most unassuming of all women? Raising my face to the sky, I began to sob. The stars in the sky blurred together into streaks of silver. ‘Why?’ I asked the Goddess. ‘Why?’
This was my fault: the Goddess had answered my prayers.
***
Excerpt from In the Shadow of the Bull by Eleanor Kuhns. Copyright 2023 by Eleanor Kuhns. Reproduced with permission from Eleanor Kuhns. All rights reserved.
Author Bio:
Eleanor Kuhns is the 2011 winner of the Minotaur/Mystery Writers of America first mystery prize for A Simple Murder. That was the first in the Will Rees series. She went on to write ten more. In the Shadow of the Bull is the first in the Ancient Crete Mystery series.
A Sense for Murder (A Sally Solari Mystery)by Leslie Karst
About A Sense for Murder
A Sense for Murder (A Sally Solari Mystery) Cozy Mystery 6th in Series Setting – California Severn House (August 1, 2023) Hardcover : 224 pages ISBN-10 : 1448309050 ISBN-13 : 978-1448309054 Digital ASIN : B0BXPY61Q1
Chef Sally Solari has – to her own bewilderment – built a reputation as a talented sleuth who keeps tripping over dead bodies. But getting mixed up in the curious case of a cookbook killer threatens to be the final chapter in not just her investigating career . . . but her life.
It’s the height of the tourist season in Santa Cruz, California, and Sally Solari has her hands full, both juggling crowds of hungry diners at her French-Polynesian restaurant Gauguin, as well as appeasing her father, who’s distressed at the number of homeless people camped out in front of Solari’s, the family’s Italian seafood restaurant out on the historic fisherman’s wharf.
Nevertheless, when Sally gets the opportunity to volunteer at a farm-to-table dinner taking place at the hip new restaurant and culinary bookshop Pages and Plums, she seizes the chance. Not only is it a fundraiser for an organization aiding the homeless and seniors, but up for auction at the event is a signed boxset of Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Sally’s hero, the renowned chef Julia Child.
But then the Pages and Plums dining room manager turns up dead – the locked cabinet containing the precious books now empty – and the irrepressible Sally once again finds herself up to her neck in a criminal investigation. She may have a sense for murder, but can Sally outwit a devious killer with a taste for French cooking before the villain makes mincemeat of her, too?
A Sense for Murder is a fast-paced, super fun culinary cozy mystery that will have your brain working and your mouth watering. And if you haven’t met sleuthing chef Sally yet, it’s safe to jump right in.
EXCERPT
If not for the clatter of my bicycle bouncing down the wooden planks of the Santa Cruz Municipal Wharf, I felt certain that every tourist I whizzed past would have been startled by the loud rumblings emanating from my empty stomach.
I’d set off on my morning ride with only a cup of coffee for sustenance, and the effects of the initial caffeine buzz had now been replaced by a severe case of low blood sugar. As a result (notwithstanding the million-dollar view of the historic fisherman’s wharf stretching out from the sparkling beach and the iconic roller coaster rising up behind), the only thing on my mind at that moment was the prospect of biting into one of my father’s famous ricotta-and-mascarpone-filled cannoli.
I spotted Dad’s tall, stocky figure standing in front of Solari’s Restaurant as soon as I rounded the bend near the end of the wharf. He was turned toward me, waving, so I waved back, then quickly grabbed hold of my handlebars as I hit a nasty bump in the road. Once closer, however, I realized he wasn’t waving at me. He hadn’t even noticed my arrival. Rather, he was shouting and gesticulating at a form sprawled on the sidewalk at the corner of the building.
‘Why the hell do you insist on camping out here?’ I heard him yell as I approached. ‘You and your kind are driving away my business!’
Wheeling up to the front entrance, I clipped out of my pedals and leaned my red-and-white road bike against the restaurant’s whitewashed wood siding. Through the neon Budweiser and Amstel Light signs hanging in the window above, I could see a table of early lunchers chowing down on plates of crab salads and linguine.
‘Hey, Dad. What’s going on?’
‘Sally.’ He turned to me with a frown. ‘I didn’t hear you ride up.’
‘Probably because you were making quite a bit of racket yourself.’
The person at his feet – a thin, gray-haired man wrapped in a dark green sleeping bag – pushed himself to an upright position and regarded the two of us with dull eyes. A fat seagull pecked at a discarded French fry not three feet from where he sat.
Dad returned the man’s gaze with an angry stare. ‘I’ve been trying for five full minutes to get this guy to move his sorry ass away from my restaurant, but he pretends like he doesn’t even hear me. Maybe I should just call the cops on you,’ he said to the cocooned man, ‘and let them deal with it.’
‘Maybe if you tried treating him like a human being, your powers of persuasion would be a little more effective,’ I responded. ‘I mean, really: “you and your kind”?’ But my father merely shook his head and turned to walk back inside Solari’s, clearly now annoyed not only with the guy in the sleeping bag but also his only daughter.
About Leslie Karst
Leslie Karst is the author of the Lefty Award-nominated Sally Solari mystery series and Justice is Served: A Tale of Scallops, the Law, and Cooking for RBG. After years waiting tables and singing in a new wave rock band, she decided she was ready for a “real” job and ended up at Stanford Law School. It was during her career as an attorney that Leslie rediscovered her youthful passion for food and cooking and once more returned to school—this time to earn a degree in culinary arts. Now retired from the law, Leslie spends her time cooking, cycling, gardening, observing cocktail hour promptly at five o’clock, and of course writing. She and her wife split their time between Santa Cruz, California, and Hilo, Hawai‘i.