With Turkey Day on the horizon, I was on the hunt for a harvest-themed whodunit. However, it seemed that I'd exhausted all of my go-to authors. Fortunately, there are cupboards full of festive culinary cozies out there. So I plucked Isis Crawford's A Catered Thanksgiving off the paperback pantry shelf. I was drawn to its colorful cover, complete with skull-embedded pumpkin pie crust. Yet once I delved into the fiction-rich filling, I had some trouble getting it down.
This was partly because I needed to become acquainted with a new sleuth, or in this case, sleuth sisters. Foodies Bernie and Libby run their late mother's catering company, A Little Taste of Heaven, in New York. They're close with their dad, a retired cop. Bernie is tall, dark, thin, and impulsive and loves clothes; Libby is short, fair, plump, and cautious and wears her pants until the elastic gives out. Needless to say, they bicker a bit. Which can be fun, albeit sometimes confusing because Crawford alternates between their points of view.
Still, the real blowout doesn't occur until the duo sets up shop in miserly Monty Field's kitchen. He's hired them to prepare a Thanksgiving feast for his feuding fireworks-fortune family, never imagining that he and the turkey will go up in smoke before the table's set. There's some description of Monty's stuffing decorating the walls, setting the stage for a story that's more gruesome than goofy, which you know isn't my cup of tea. Adding insult to pyrotechnic-induced injury, I thought I'd figured the mystery out, and everyone knows that's no fun. But it turns out that I was a turkey! Because there's a twist at the end that implodes everything, and it's as satisfying as a potato cheese casserole.
Which got me thinking, if I was wrong about the killer, then maybe I was wrong about the rest of it too.
The only way to know for sure is to see what Bernie and Libby cook up for Christmas.
