Author: Ellen Byron
Genre: Mystery
Mass Market Paperback; Digital Book
ISBN #: 9780593437612
Berkley Publishing
304 Pages
$8.99; $8.99 Amazon
June 7, 2022
⭐⭐⭐⭐
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 -- collection 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 Rick'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?
✽✽✽✽✽✽✽✽
Ricki James left Lost Angeles after her husband died in a freak accident. Now moved to New Orleans, she embraces the city she where she took her first breath, and has found a position in the Bon Vee Culinary House Museum running their vintage kitchenware shop, sharing her profits with the museum. She's happy enough with this, but doesn't like the bickering between the tour guides. When one of the guides is fired after stealing, the staff is grateful, since he wasn't well-liked. But the next day, an unexpected arrival of books is delivered...along with his body in a trunk.
Ricki thinks the killer might be one of the employees, but she wisely keeps this to herself as she tries to figure out who killed the man. After searching for clues, she doesn't think she's getting much closer to the killer until something unexpected occurs...and Ricki might find herself fatally bookmarked...
This is the first book in the series, and I will say that the cover is beautiful. This is part of why I wanted to read the book, the second being that I absolutely love Ms. Byron's Pelican series. I suppose I was hoping this would be more like that series, but it is as far away from it as can be while still taking place in Louisiana. There are just too many characters to keep track of, and since I read this on my Kindle, it was too difficult to go back to the page listing characters and then back to where I was, so I finally just gave up.
While I give kudos for the writing, as Ms. Byron is a talented writer with a gift for description of the characters' surroundings, it was at the same time hard to care about any of the people since you didn't get a full description of them. I would have liked to have known more about Lyla and her family, meeting both Kaitlyn and Dan; and why Theo is the way he is about everything. What is the truth about Zellah and Mordant's relationship (if any). I realize that it is hard to connect everything in a first book, but if there had been less characters, it would have been easier. Oh, well.
At any rate, Ricki at first finds herself a fish out of water until she begins to make a few friends, and maybe a surprise one of the homicide detective herself, which I found both interesting and nice. I do like Eugenia, her intelligence and grace showing; but found it hard to involve myself with Ricki.
When we get toward the ending the killer is revealed, and the reason for the murder. Understandable, if you know the saying about why the man was murdered -- but I am not going to reveal that here. After all was discovered, there are a few chapters left in which we learn a little more about Ricki's new life, and a teaser chapter of the next book in the series. Recommended.
I received a copy of this book from the publisher and NetGalley but this in no way influenced my review.
More on Ellen Byron's Books: https://www.fantasticfiction.com/b/ellen-byron/
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