Food Fiction

Melanie Cooper has zero interest in catering her 15-year high school reunion, but Angie insists it’s only right that they bask in the success of Fairy Tale Cupcakes - and Mel’s engagement to the delicious Joe DeLaura is the cherry on top! Everything is going better than expected until Mel’s high school nemesis picks a fight. No longer willing to put up with Cassidy Havers’s bullying, Mel is ready to tell the former homecoming queen to shut her piehole and call it a night. But as Mel and Joe prepare to depart, Cassidy is found dead in the girls’ bathroom....

During the week between Christmas and New Year's, the year-round population of Key West, Florida, faces a tsunami of tourists and snowbirds. It doesn't help that outrageously wealthy key-lime-pie aficionado David Sloan has persuaded the city to host his pie-baking contest. Every pie purveyor on the island is out to win the coveted Key Lime Key to the City, and Key Zest food-critic Hayley Snow is on the scene to report it. Meanwhile, Hayley's home life is turning more tart than sweet.

It's New Year's Eve, the holiday of forced fellowship, mandatory fun, and paper hats. While dining out with her husband and their friends, Kirshenbaum's protagonist - an acerbic, mordantly witty, and clinically depressed writer - fully unravels. Propelled by stand-up comic timing and rife with pinpoint insights, Kirshenbaum examines what it means to be unloved and loved, to succeed and fail, to be at once impervious and raw. Rabbits for Food shows how art can lead us out of - or into - the depths of disconsolate loneliness and piercing grief.

This box set includes the first three books in Lucy Burdette's cozy culinary Key West Food Critic Mystery series: An Appetite for Murder, Death in Four Courses, and Topped Chef.

Darlene, once an exemplary wife and a loving mother to her young son, Eddie, finds herself devastated by the unforeseen death of her husband. Unable to cope with her grief, she turns to drugs and quickly forms an addiction. One day she disappears without a trace.

Peace and quiet are hard to find in bustling Key West, so Hayley Snow, a food critic for Key Zest magazine, is taking the afternoon off for a tranquil lunch with a friend outside of town. As they are enjoying the wild beach and the lunch, she realizes that her husband Nathan’s dog, Ziggy, has disappeared. She follows his barking and finds him furiously digging at a shallow grave with a man’s body in it. Davis Jager, a local birdwatcher, identifies him as GG Garcia, a rabble-rousing Key West local and developer.

Margo Everson sees the call out for the cookbook club and knows she’s found her people. Recently dumped by her self-absorbed husband, who frankly isn’t much of a loss, she has little to show for her marriage but his "parting gift"—a dilapidated old farm house—and a collection of well-loved cookbooks. Aja Alexander just hopes her newfound friends won’t notice that that every time she looks at food, she gets queasy. It’s hard hiding a pregnancy, especially one she can’t bring herself to share with her wealthy boyfriend and his snooty mother.

In her Food Lovers' Village Mysteries, Agatha Award-winning author Leslie Budewitz introduces us to Jewel Bay, a tight-knit Montana community that thrives on tourism and farm-to-table fare. Featuring Erin Murphy, beloved proprietor of the Merc—a century-old general store converted into a local foods market-each book brings us closer to the folks who call Jewel Bay home, and the cunning culprits in their midst.

When Jessica Harris flies home to Australia to sort out her late brother's estate, the last thing she wants to face is his altruistic investment - an eatery on the rural Bellarine Peninsula. The injured British/Indian elite cyclist just wants to settle up, move on, get rehab, and certainly not have to deal with the restaurant's beautiful owner and artisan foodie, Lillian McAllister, or her sweet, four-year-old daughter. In order to win, Jessica's disciplined life is dedicated to controlling her emotions, and she isn't sure she'd survive letting her walls down now.

Key Zest food critic Hayley Snow and her groom, Police Detective Nathan Bransford, chose Scotland for their long-delayed honeymoon, hoping to sightsee and enjoy some prize-winning scones. But their romantic duo swells to a crowd when they're joined by Nathan's family as well as octogenarian Miss Gloria. Nathan's sister Vera takes the women on a whirlwind tour of some of Scotland's iconic mystic places as research for a looming book project. But the trip takes a deadly tartan turn when a dinner party guest falls ill and claims she was poisoned.

On the eve of her high school reunion, Hayley Powell dreads seeing the trio of mean girls who used to torment her: Sabrina Merryweather, Nykki Temple, and former prom queen Ivy Foster. These days Ivy wears a different crown as the cupcake queen - and flaunting her success is just the icing on the cake.

When the Cool Bean picks the name of the coolest of the cool beans, Beanadette, out of a hat for the annual gift exchange, he’s not feeling very merry or festive—he’s feeling pressure! Beanadette is definitely expecting the coolest present of all. Will the Cool Bean find the perfect gift in time for the party?

When Hayley is invited to do a cooking demo on one of daytime's most popular talk shows, it's a welcome distraction from her empty nest blues. And the newfound fame certainly has its perks - especially when Olivia Redmond, the posh bacon heiress of Redmond Meats, offers Hayley a writing gig with a juicy paycheck.

Who better than food and cocktails columnist Hayley Powell to book a caterer for the Island Times holiday party? But Hayley's quest for a cook turns into the pursuit of a killer who caters to no one....

Having a pet dragon is very fun! He can sit, roll over, and play. He can candle a birthday cake, lit a campfire, or so many other cool things. But what if your dragon only eats junk and processed foods? What if pizzas, burgers, fries, and hot dogs are all foods that he enjoys? What if he is eating too much sweets? What if he refuses to eat vegetables and fruits?

Inspired by the exploits of ill-fated country-rock visionary Gram Parsons, this mid-60s tale of idealism and escape traces the trials of a fictionalized draft-dodging flower child from the United States to Canada and back.

Isabella Pasternack is a food person. She revels in the beauty of a perfectly cooked egg, she daydreams about her first meal at Chez Panisse, and every inch of her tiny apartment teems with cookbooks, from Prune to Cooking by Hand to Roast Chicken and Other Stories. What Isabella is not, unfortunately, is a gainfully employed person. In the wake of a disastrous live-streamed soufflé demonstration, Isabella is summarily fired from her job at a digital food magazine and must quickly find a way to keep herself in buckwheat and anchovy paste.

Becca Fletcher has always hated Christmas, but she has her reasons for being Little Miss Grinch. Now, though, she can’t avoid her version of ho-ho-hell - because she’s travelling to the Comfort Food Cafe to spend the festive season with her sister Laura and her family. She’s expecting mulled wine, 24-hour Christmas movie marathons and all kinds of very merry torture. Little does Becca know that the Comfort Food Cafe is like no other place on earth.

Since its earliest days, The New Yorker has been a tastemaker: literally. As the home of A. J. Liebling, Joseph Wechsberg, and M. F. K. Fisher, who practically invented American food writing, the magazine established a tradition that is carried forward today by irrepressible literary gastronomes, including Calvin Trillin, Bill Buford, Adam Gopnik, Jane Kramer, and Anthony Bourdain. Now, in this indispensable collection, The New Yorker dishes up a feast of delicious writing on food and drink.

In an attempt to woo tourists to Jewel Bay and cheer up the townies, Erin Murphy, manager of the specialty local foods market known as the Merc, is organizing the First Annual Food Lovers' Film Festival, filled with classic foodie flicks and local twists on favorite movie treats. But when her partner in planning, painter Christine Vandeberg, is found dead only days before the curtain rises, Erin suspects someone is attempting to stop the films from rolling.