Cook the Books by Jessica Conant-Park and Susan Conant

The mother-daughter team of Conant-Park and Conant have an imaginative series going with the "Gourmet Girl Mystery" series set in Boston.  "Cook the Books" is the 5th in the series featuring not so aspiring social worker, Chloe Carter.

Carter is a somewhat typical 20-something.  She has over-spent her credit limit doting on her best friend's baby.  She hasn't really found her calling in life, but thinks she should at least give a try to finish a master's in social work (or at least that is what will qualify her to get access to a trust fund from a dead relative). She prides herself on being independent, and it is that stubborn independence that makes her stay in Boston when her boyfriend accepts a job as a personal cook in Hawaii and invites her to come along.  She is so hurt that he made this plan without her participation she cuts him off totally, and makes herself miserable in the process.

Now Chloe desperately needs a part time job, and she responds to an ad to assist a cook book editor with the editing of a new cook book. The son of a famous chef is supposed to be working on the book and is making a mess of it. Chloe saves him organizationally and in terms of the recipes he is planning for the book. She proposes that they meet up with a friend of her former boyfriend, Digger, a chef who is about to open a new high profile restaurant in Boston.  The night before the arranged meeting Digger is killed in a fire that sweeps through his apartment.  Chloe has to discover who killed Digger and why while she juggles her work schedule, her school and clinical internship schedule, and resolving her feelings for the former boyfriend, Josh, who has returned to Boston for the opening of Digger's new restaurant.

The authors manage to keep the reader's interest throughout the book.  Both authors are social workers, and Conant-Park is married to a Boston chef, so they write about things they know.  They are able to legitimately endow their character with the kinds of skills and perception that make for good storytelling and great powers of observation for solving crimes.

I'm surprised I've missed the earlier books in this series and will make up for that by reading some of the previous books in the series.

Conant also has a well know series of mysteries for dog lovers, and I am familiar with some of the books in that series.

Liz Nichols

Susan Conant's "All Shots, A Dog Lover's Mystery"

This was not the best read of the summer. I do appreciate all the information I did not previously know about malamutes, and learning that that breed and Alaskan huskies are not the same thing was of some interest.

There is lots of non-fiction information in this book for dog lovers.

As mysteries go, however, I found this one confusing. There were just too many Holly Winters in the book. That's all part of the plot. The heroine's name is Holly Winter, and there are two more Holly Winter characters involved. It seems like someone is trying to steal the heroine's identity until she finds out there are others with her name. I haven't gone back to verify this, but with all the Holly Winter characters running around (or lying in the morgue) it felt like the author was changing voices all the time. Perhaps that's what led to the confusion.

At any rate, I just couldn't get into this one, unlike some of her previous Dog Lover's Mystery titles. Perhaps the series is growing stale.

Conant also has a new series for cat lovers and another mystery series for "gourmet girls."

Liz Nichols