The Crème Brûlée Catastrophe

A Small Town Culinary Cozy Mystery with Cat

By: Maisy Marple

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Restaurant Week was supposed to be Pelican Harbor's sweetest week of the year. Five days of tasting menus, harbor lanterns, and Blair Whitcome's legendary crème brûlée anchoring the finale — until a kitchen fire at the Bayou Brasserie kills the town's visiting food critic and turns a celebration into a crime scene. The fire marshal calls it an accident. Blair calls it wrong. The grease trap was clean three weeks ago. The back window was freshly sealed. And the exit was blocked before the fire ever started.

What begins as professional instinct — a chef who knows what clean kitchens look like and what they don't — pulls Blair into the most complicated case she's ever worked. Piers Gannon wasn't just a food critic. He was a licensed investigator hired by the restaurant's insurer to follow a trail of suspicious kitchen fires stretching across the Gulf Coast. He was close to cracking it when someone decided he'd gotten too close. Now it's up to Blair, Nora's library research, Hank's early-morning observations, and one very motivated orange tabby to finish what Piers started — before the evidence disappears with the man who knows where it went.

The Crème Brûlée Catastrophe is the sixth and final book in the Pelican Harbor Patisserie Mystery series. For readers who've been with Blair from the beginning, this is the sweet finish.