Crescent City Christmas Chaos

Vintage Cookbook Mystery, #4

by

Ellen Byron

This holiday season in the Big Easy is anything but easy!

When Virgil surprises Ricki by hiring her father out of retirement as the cameraman for his upcoming cooking show special, she’s ecstatic to be reunited with her adoptive parents for the holidays, and as they’ll all be busy with the show and working at the Bon Vee Culinary House Museum, they’ve planned their visit to extend into the New Year. Ricki wants to take the opportunity to pick her mother’s brain about her memories of Ricki’s first days, when she was left at Charity Hospital as a newborn by her teenage birth mom. Josepha had always been supportive of Ricki’s quest to learn more about her birth parents, but this time, she’s uncharacteristically vague and resistant to delving into the past, especially when Ricki stumbles across the name of one of Josepha’s former coworkers who worked in the Records Department at that time. Tracking the older woman down proves simple, but Ricki gets creepy vibes from her the minute she mentions her mother is in town, and terminates the visit before asking about her memories of the teenager who gave her up for adoption. However, when the woman is found dead in her home under suspicious circumstances the next day, Ricki and her parents become prime suspects in her death. 

Crescent City Christmas Chaos is the fourth book in author Ellen Byron’s intriguing New Orleans-set Vintage Cookbook Mystery series, and features vintage shop owner Miracle “Ricki” Fleur de Lis James-Diaz and her friends, family, and coworkers at the city’s beautiful Bon Vee Culinary House Museum. Ricki has established a unique and successful small business that she loves and has embarked on a lovely new romance with celebrity chef and neighbor Virgil Morel. Their relationship is still in the early stages, and Ricki is quite taken with Virgil’s innate goodness, especially after her past romantic experiences. They really fit well as a couple, as do her adoptive parents, Josepha and Luis James-Diaz, who met, married, and relocated to Los Angeles when Ricki was small. 

While the main plot follows Ricki’s well-done personal investigation into Phyllis Gibbs’s death, some interesting subplots vie for attention, including Virgil’s cooking special, the Bon Vee staff’s cookbook project, and Theo Charbonnet’s curiously secretive activities. Ricki’s search for her birth parents has been a theme running through the series since the beginning, and little pieces of the puzzle have been revealed in each successive mystery. This book does not disappoint. 

With its crush of great subplots involving a plethora of engaging recurring characters, I recommend CRESCENT CITY CHRISTMAS CHAOS to cozy mystery readers, especially those who’ve read the previous novels in the series and those who enjoy a New Orleans setting or adoption theme. 

I voluntarily reviewed this after receiving an Advance Review Copy from the author through Partners in Crime Virtual Book Tours.