A Cookbook Conspiracy: A Bibliophile Mystery
Brooklyn Wainwright can’t cook, but she’s an expert bookbinder. Her sister, Savannah, though, is a top chef, with an array of friends, all classmates from Le Cordon Bleu. One of those friends had given Savannah a manuscript of an eighteenth-century “receipt” book, and now she wants to return it, rebound, as a gift upon the opening of his newest restaurant in San Francisco. Within hours of giving him the cookbook, Savannah finds him dead, stabbed in the restaurant’s kitchen, and the cookbook is nowhere to be found. Brooklyn is sure the cookbook is the key to clearing her sister and studies the photocopies she made before undertaking the rebinding and restoration. She shows her security-expert boyfriend, who in turn calls in his MI6 brother, a code expert. While the sleuths are trying to crack the code in the cookbook, the gathered chefs, who cannot leave San Francisco, cook meals for each other, providing Brooklyn ample opportunity to probe their friendships—and enmities. The descriptions of the meals are luscious, and the history of the book intriguing, as befits the seventh in the series. Includes recipes. --Karen Muller