#BookReview: Bayou Book Thief by Ellen Byron

Bayou Book Thief (Vintage Cookbook Mystery, #1) by Ellen Byron
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy mystery, culinary mystery, mystery
Series: Vintage Cookbook Mystery #1
Pages: 304
Published by Berkley on June 7, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A fantastic new cozy mystery series with a vintage flair from USA Today bestselling and Agatha Award-winning author Ellen Byron.
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 - collecting 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 Ricky 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 Ricki'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?

My Review:

There is just something about New Orleans, and there probably always has been. There certainly always has been for me, as I’ve been drawn to reading books set in that city ever since my very first visit decades ago. So, when a friend picked up this book and said it looked like fun, I was more than willing to come along for the virtual trip.

Ricki James isn’t so much visiting as returning home to New Orleans after a long absence when this story begins. Her move may be a return to her roots after years in Los Angeles, but it also represents a fresh start – or at least Ricki certainly hopes so. She has come home in an attempt to dodge not one but two scandals she hopes she left behind in LA.

Just as no good deed goes unpunished, no really big scandal ever truly gets left behind – particularly not when there’s still some juice left in it. A situation with which Ricki becomes all too aware when a new and equally juicy scandal arrives at her door.

Not, initially, her personal door, but definitely, more importantly and absolutely worse, the door of her new and just barely established antique cookery, bookstore and museum gift shop at the equally newly established Bon Vee Culinary House Museum in the Garden District home of the late and much lamented Genevieve “Vee” Charbonnet, one of the city’s legendary restaurateurs.

One of the museum’s docents, a man nearly everyone on the staff can barely stand – at best – is caught red-handed with a selection of her shop’s vintage cookbooks concealed under his coat. It’s theft, pure and simple – no matter how much he tries to pin the blame that is so obviously his on practically every other person on the scene. His attempt to shift the blame merely spreads the ill-will he has always engendered – and avails him absolutely not.

But it might be the cause of his murder that night. A murder that casts a shadow over the Museum AND Ricki’s shop, as the theft, the spurious accusations the man threw around, AND the general enmity that nearly everyone seems to have felt for him, points out a possible motive. A motive that, as thin as it might seem, seems to be the only one the police can find.

The question, a question that seems to generally hover around the NOPD according to these local residents, is whether the police are willing and/or able to look all that hard when there’s an easy solution clearly to hand.

And that’s what leads antique cookbook expert Ricki James onto the path that many a worried amateur sleuth has trod before her. She decides to investigate the murder herself. Just to see if she can find a clue – or ten – that the police might have missed. In the hopes of preserving a wonderful place full of terrific people who are doing good work and might just offer her a chance to make a new place for herself into the bargain.

Escape Rating B: Bayou Book Thief was simply a delicious starter for a cozy mystery series. There was plenty of atmosphere – well of course because New Orleans – along with tempting red herrings, a fascinating ‘home base’ filled with interesting and quirky characters AND a whole series of villains that were easy to hate.

Beginning with that first murder victim, as it seems like no one misses the man. He was a nuisance when he was alive – and an even bigger one now that he’s dead. Leaving behind oodles of potential suspects and plenty of motives.

What made the story extra, added fun and filled with even more surprises was that the motive was wrapped around a decades old secret in a way that added to all the charm – and warmed the cockles of this booklover’s heart.

Writing randy romances – actually soft core porn – in the 1950s (around the time that the infamous Peyton Place was first published) was just not the done thing for young blue-blooded women possessing New Orleans’ finest pedigrees. Over half a century later, the now 80something Madame Lucretia Noisette is delighted that her old pseudonym has been rediscovered and she’s more than willing to own it.

The world has changed in the intervening decades, and at her age she’s past caring about any possible remaining potential scandal – even if her son and her grandchildren are not.

Little do they know that it’s not grand-mère’s once upon a time scandal that will cause the most problems. It’s not even Ricki’s much more recent scandals – the ones that she hoped she had left behind in LA. (That she had one serious scandal in her past is not atypical for the amateur detective in a cozy series. Two, however, struck this reader as a bit over-the-top, as both scandals were extremely juicy to the point where having one person be involved in both felt a bit like ‘overegging the pudding’. I’m curious to see the effects they’ll have on Ricki in future books in the series.)

Where back in the day the investigative axiom “cherchez la femme” might have led to the real villain, in this later day “follow the money” is a much better bet. Even if Ricki doesn’t figure out the whole thing at the very last moment.

She’s still ahead of the NOPD, something that is likely to spur her to future investigations. As it already has, considering that there are at least two more books in this charming cozy mystery series, Wined and Died in New Orleans and French Quarter Fright Night. I’m certainly planning on a return visit the next time I feel like ‘laissez les bon temps rouler’ the way to murder.

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