
Book Four in the Sally Solari Mystery Series
Finalist, 2020 Lefty Award: Best Humorous Mystery
Foodies and fans of cozy mysteries will both love the latest installment in Karst’s series.... With this intricately plotted mystery, Karst draws the reader further into Sally’s engaging and often amusing world... a delicious mystery.
—Booklist
Karst’s lively...whodunit...is cover-to-cover fun for culinary cozy fans.
—Publishers Weekly
[P]erfect for fans of the Food Network. Peppered with a sampling of life in the culinary industry, it’s the variety of characters that readers will most enjoy getting to know. As a blind woman, Evelyn is a fascinating character that adds to the diverse landscape of the cozy crime genre.
—BOLO Books
Karst seasons her writing with an accurate insider’s view of restaurant operation, as well as a tenderness in the way she treats family, death and Sally’s reactions to Evelyn’s blindness.
—Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine
Restaurateur Sally Solari’s cousin Evelyn may be blind, but she can see all too clearly that her chef mother’s death wasn’t an accidental overdose―she was murdered.

Santa Cruz restaurateur Sally Solari’s life is already boiling over as she deals with irate cooks and other staffing issues at the busy Gauguin restaurant. The rainy December weather isn’t cooling things down, either. So she’s steamed when her dad persuades her to take in Evelyn, her estranged blind cousin whose mother has just died of a drug overdose.
But Evelyn proves to be lots of fun and she’s a terrific cook. Back at the house she’d shared with her mom, Evelyn’s heightened sense of touch tells her that various objects―a bottle of cranberry juice, her grandfather’s jazz records―are out of place. She and her mom always kept things in the same place so Evelyn could find them. So she suspects that her mother’s death was neither accident nor suicide, no matter what the police believe.
The cousins’ sleuthing takes Sally and Evelyn into the world of macho commercial kitchens, and the cutthroat competitiveness that can flame up between chefs. In Leslie Karst’s scrumptious fourth Sally Solari mystery, Sally will have to chop a long list of suspects down to size or end up getting burned.