Murder On The Menu

Best friends Annie and Eve know the bare bones of both culinary school and amateur sleuthing. Now they’re in the trenches, struggling to keep a new restaurant, Bellywasher’s, from going belly up… Annie and Eve have joined their former cooking teacher, Jim—who doubles as Annie’s on-again, off-again boyfriend—in running his new restaurant, Bellywasher’s. Bombshell Eve is the hostess, while Annie stays behind the scenes, frantically managing everything from the books to the radicchio supply. Then a rave review makes the spot an instant success, drawing Washington’s high-powered elite to sample Jim’s cooking…people with both money and secrets to burn. Everything’s simmering along just fine until Annie and Eve find their friend Sarah, staffer to a powerful Congressman, lying dead in her tub. The cops want to write it off as a suicide, but the girls notice that, like Annie’s invoices, the facts just don’t add up. Then, after a series of suspicious “accidents” that come dangerously close to taking the girls permanently out of commission, Annie and Eve realize that this kitchen fire isn’t about to put itself out…

‘A sparklingly delicious confection to satisfy the mystery reader’s appetite’ Helena Dixon, bestselling author of the Miss Underhay Mysteries

A sexy sleuth, a silenced stripper, and a sociopathic serial killer ...Murder on the Menu is the debut novel of award winning author, Nancy Skopin. The first in a series of mysteries featuring Private Investigator Nicoli "Nikki" Hunter, the only child of a Cossack and a former nun. Nikki is a smart, tenacious thirty-five-year-old, who lives aboard her sailboat in the San Francisco Bay Area and runs her PI business out of a ground floor office in the marina where she lives.In Murder on the Menu, Nikki has lost enthusiasm for the mundane surveillance jobs that pay the bills but no longer challenge her. When the brutal murder of socialite, and exotic dancer, Laura Howard, lands on her desk, she finally encounters a foe worthy of her unique skills.

In this memoir-turned-cookbook, Alice B. Toklas describes her life with partner Gertrude Stein and their famed Paris salon, which entertained the great avant-garde and literary figures of their day. With dry wit and characteristic understatement Toklas ponders the ethics of killing a carp in her kitchen before stuffing it with chestnuts; decorating a fish to amuse Picasso at lunch; and travelling across France during the First World War in an old delivery truck, gathering local recipes along the way. She includes a friend's playful recipe for 'Haschiche Fudge', which promises 'brilliant storms of laughter and ecstatic reveries', much like her book.

'An irresistably delicious mix of cooking and murder' Trisha Ashley Chef Charlie Hunter's arrival in the beautiful Chilterns is the fulfilment of a long-held dream: to open her own restaurant in an idyllic countryside location. The Old Forge sits on the village green (complete with duck pond and flint-faced houses) and seems just the place for the high-quality cooking she wants to be known for. But instead of rural peace and a chance to lick her wounds, Charlie finds something ugly stirring under the chocolate box perfection. When a prominent local builder is found dead in suspicious circumstances, Charlie the outsider becomes a suspect. And the only way to clear her name seems to be to find out who the real killer is. Luckily she has allies: her student waitress, a kitchen porter making up in muscles what he lacks in brain and a briskly efficient clairvoyant. Using all the craft Charlie's learned in kitchens – discipline, timing, preparation and grim determination – she will be as relentless in her quest to bring a murderer to justice as she is in creating the perfect meal.

A storm. A disappearance. A race against time . . . Mustique is in a state of breathless calm as tropical storm Cristobal edges towards it across the Atlantic. Most villa owners have escaped the island but a few young socialites remain, unwilling to let summer's partying end. American heiress Amanda Fortini is one such thrill-seeker - until she heads out for a morning swim and doesn't return. Detective Sergeant Solomon Nile is just 28 years old and the island's only fully trained police officer. He quickly realises he needs to contact Lord and Lady Blake, who bought the island decades ago and have invested time, money and love creating a paradise. Jasper is in St Lucia designing a new village of luxury villas but Lady Veronica (Vee to her friends) catches a plane immediately. Her beloved god-daughter, Lily, is on the island and this disappearance has alarming echoes of what happened to Lily's mother many years ago. Lady Vee would never desert a friend in need, and she can keep a cool head in a crisis. When Amanda's body is found, a murder investigation begins. Nile knows the killer must be an islander because flights and ferry crossings have stopped due to the storm warning, but the local community isn't co-operating. And then the storm hits, and someone else disappears . . .