Virtual Tour & #Giveaway for Final Fondue by Maya Corrigan

Welcome to my stop on the Release Blitz, presented by Great Escapes Virtual Book Tours, for Final Fondue by Maya Corrigan.  Please leave a comment or question for Maya to let her know you stopped by.  You may enter the tour wide giveaway by filling out the Rafflecopter form below.  You may also follow all of the stops on the tour by clicking on the banner above.  The more stops you visit, the better your odds of winning. Good Luck!

Food and Murder: A Delicious Combination by Maya Corrigan, Final Fondue: A Five-Ingredient Mystery

My Five-Ingredient Mysteries are classic whodunits with a culinary flavor. People often ask me how I ended up writing books that combine murder and food. It all began when my fourth grade teacher gave me her Nancy Drew collection. I devoured all of them. My only reservation about them was that there were never any murders in them. Obviously, I had a taste for violence at an early age. So I moved onto adult mysteries, encouraged by my mother, who brought home stacks of detective books from the library each week.

I first wrote about food and murder in a short story, “Delicious Death,” which appeared in the anthology, Chesapeake Crimes: They Had It Comin’ (2010). A mini culinary whodunit, the story begins and ends with a dinner party and involves a suspicious death. The cast includes a food snob, a glutton, a “cook” who nukes dinner, and a hostess whose platters resemble works of art. Their different approaches to food reveal their characters and foreshadow the solution to the mystery. You can read the story on my website. Not only did I have a lot of fun writing “Delicious Death,” I found my niche. The story whetted my appetite to create a longer mystery with a food theme.

Food is a good characterizing device in a mystery because people’s attitudes toward it mirror their values and fears. A glutton shows greed at the table, and greed is a common motive for murder. A woman who never cooks, but serves only cold food, recalls the saying that revenge is a dish best served cold. It makes sense that food provides insights into character because, as the saying goes, you are what you eat. Observing what and how people eat can lead a sleuth to conclusions about what’s important to them.

Food also has an emotional resonance. That’s true for the dish central to the plot and theme of the third book in my series, Final Fondue. In The Tastemakers, a book about culinary fads, writer David Sax says that he has yet to encounter a food trend with stronger images and associations than fondue. It is “a conjurer of the past,” and the past hangs over Final Fondue. The residents of a Chesapeake Bay town where café manager Val Deniston lives with her widowed grandfather are commemorating the 300th anniversary of the town’s founding. As Granddad readies his old Victorian house for weekend visitors to the town’s festival, he brings down a fondue pot from the attic and thereby seems to unleash a genie from the past.

Nostalgia for the fondue parties of the 1970s leads Granddad to make chocolate fondue to welcome the houseguests. The guests are anything but warm to each other as they sit around the table dipping fruit and cake into the warm chocolate. Later, one of them is murdered while eating fondue leftovers. As Val delves into the pasts of the houseguests to find a motive for the murder, her past tugs at her. Two men she knew when she was a cookbook publicist in Manhattan confront her, complicating her love life and her sleuthing. 

Final Fondue (A Five-Ingredient Mystery)

Cozy Mystery
3rd in Series
Publisher: Kensington (June 28, 2016)
Mass Market Paperback: 304 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1617731426
E-Book ASIN: B0165HVIPM

Buy Links:  Amazon | B&N | Kobo | Google Play | Kensington

About the book:

Val Deniston certainly has her plate full running a café, dabbling with recipes, and helping her grandfather prepare for the town’s upcoming tri-centennial celebration, but she’s grown fond of her new life in the Chesapeake Bay town of Bayport. . .

So when Val is asked to reclaim her old position as a cookbook publicist in New York City, she puts off her decision in order to help her grandfather perfect his chocolate fondue for the weekend festivity’s dessert cook-off. But after the opening ceremonies, Val finds a houseguest strangled to death in her grandfather’s backyard. She suspects a classic case of mistaken identity, especially when another guest nearly bids her life a fondue farewell. Now it’s up to Val to keep the killer from making another stab at murder . . .

Includes 6 five-ingredient recipes!

About This Author

Maya Corrigan lives near Washington, D.C., within easy driving distance of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, the setting for this series. She has taught courses in writing, detective fiction, and American literature at Georgetown University and NOVA community college. A winner of the Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence in Mystery and Suspense, she has published essays on drama and short stories under her full name of Mary Ann Corrigan.

Author Links

WebPage: mayacorrigan.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/MayaCorriganBooks/305167769636032

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