<p>I tripped over the body of Dusty Routt sometime after<br>10 o'clock on the evening of October 19. . .</p><p>The New York Times bestselling author cooks up a knockout treat featuring the irrepressible caterer Goldy Schulz.</p><p>Goldy Schulz has a lucrative new gig, preparing breakfasts and conference room snacks for a local law firm. It's time-consuming, but Goldy is enjoying it -- until the night she arrives to find Dusty, the firm's paralegal, dead. The poor young woman also happens to be Goldy's friend and neighbor, and now Dusty's grieving mother begs Goldy to find out who murdered her daughter.</p><p>Just because the police are on the case doesn't mean Goldy can't do a little snooping herself. While catering a party at the home of one of the firm's lawyers, she manages to overhear an incriminating conversation and ends up discovering a few clues in the kitchen. Before long, Goldy is knee deep in suspects, one of whom is incredibly dangerous and very liable to cook Goldy's goose.</p>
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Taste & Intrigue Welded In. Slurp & Slither.
A riveting intensity in the opening scene of DARK TORT (the legal term for wrongful act, not "torte" as in pastry) was sparked by the first sentence of chapter one, page one. But what welded the rivets for me was the culinary catastrophe in the third paragraph: "The bag of flour I was carrying slid from my hands and exploded on the carpet. Two jars of yeast plummeted onto the coffee table, where they burst into shards and powder. My last bottle of molasses sailed in a wide arc and cracked onto the receptionist's cherry-wood desk. A thick wave of sweet, dark liquid began a gluey descent across the phone console. My steel bowl of bread sponge catapulted out or my arms and hit the wall." With each sensory impression in that paragraph having opened gateways into my mind, I would be reading onward with awakened interest. I approach each new offering from Diane Mott Davidson with an anticipation expanded from each previous issue in her Goldilocks catering collection. Mesmerized by the luscious book jacket on DARK TORT, I picked up the hardback with my right hand, and ran my left fingertips over the face of the cool, smooth, brail effective jacket. I was more than ready to pick up on what this author had done subtly differently this time to continue infusing her stories with the edge and surge which had kept them riding tips of waves of cravings for culinary mysteries. Davidson wasn't the first, of course, to use the sensuality of food flavors, cooking processes, and recipe insertions to invite readers more cozily into a series of mysteries. See my "chickens or eggs" Listmania about this sub genre, including those early Series of Yum featuring Nero Wolfe, Spenser, Eugenia Potter, and Archy McNally. Davidson's coup, however, rather than pioneering the pack, was to instinctively expand a few of the cores of appeal, as exposed in the paragraph quoted above, and touched upon in my Listmania of DMD's Goldy series. The first 40 pages had the feel of a nightmare; I had half ex...
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