Soul of a Killer (A Books & Biscuits Mystery, Band 2) - Softcover

Buch 2 von 2: Books & Biscuits Mysteries

Collette, Abby

 
9780593336205: Soul of a Killer (A Books & Biscuits Mystery, Band 2)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593336208 ISBN 13: 9780593336205
Verlag: Berkley, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

In this mouthwatering cozy mystery series, fraternal twins Keaton and Koby are trying to run their combined soul food café and bookstore, but they find themselves searching for a cold-hearted killer.

Keaton and Koby are fraternal twins who were separated as children, but now they’ve found each other and opened Books & Biscuits in the pleasant Pacific Northwest town of Timber Lake. Business is booming, but even so, trouble always seems to find them. 

Mama Zola, Koby’s devoted foster mom, has taken up residence in Timber Lake. She and Pete, one of the bookstore’s quirky employees, bring a peach cobbler over to her church’s potluck, and then someone who sampled the cobbler is found dead. Mama Zola and Pete find themselves suspects in the murder, but luckily Koby and Keaton are ready to sling out a side of justice.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Wall Street Journal bestselling author Abby Collette loves a good mystery. She was born and raised in Cleveland, and it's a mystery even to her why she hasn't yet moved to a warmer place. As Abby Collette, she is the author of the Ice Cream Parlor Mystery series, about a millennial MBA-holding granddaughter running a family-owned ice cream shop in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and the Books & Biscuits Mystery series, starring a set of fraternal twins who reunite and open a bookstore and soul food café. Writing as Abby L. Vandiver, she is the author of the Logan Dickerson Mysteries, featuring a second-generation archaeologist and a nonagenarian, as well as the Romaine Wilder Mysteries, pairing an East Texas medical examiner and her feisty, funeral-home-owning auntie as sleuths. Abby spends her time writing, facilitating writing workshops at local libraries, and hanging out with her grandchildren, each of whom are her favorite.
 

 

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Chapter One

"I hate living in the future."

That was Mama Zola's response every time my twin brother, Koby, mentioned to her she needed a cell phone.

"I like the past better. Simpler times," she said. "Just give me a rotary phone, a typewriter and a transistor radio and I'm good."

And that was the line she gave when he told her that a cell phone wasn't a thing of the future, people had been using them for more than twenty years.

But that was Zola Jackson. She wasn't much for change.

We were at Mama Zola's church, Everlasting Missionary Baptist Church on the outskirts of Timber Lake in the unincorporated limits of Porter. We were dropping her off, and Koby wanted to be sure she could reach us if she needed to.

I was with her on the cell phone, though. I rarely kept mine on, the bookstore and my house had landlines and I was always one place or the other. Plus, I didn't have many people to talk to.

Mama Zola was so excited about the day. It hadn't been long since she'd moved to our lakeside town. She'd come to help me and Koby at our cafŽ and bookstore, Books & Biscuits. This was a new church home for Mama Zola. She hadn't wasted any time joining the month after she settled in her new place, a few blocks from our store. Koby wanted to make sure she was okay since he would no longer be in the City to keep an eye on her.

Koby and I had driven her and Pete Howers to the church so they could get set up for the Annual Founder's Day Potluck. A red brick church with a white wooden steeple, it was one story and had had two additions added over the years, one on each side of the atrium, the original building where the chapel was located. The additions were long and L-shaped with lots of closed doors. We'd come in through the chapel.

Today would be Mama Zola's first time participating and she was trying to show out. She'd been up cooking since three a.m. And if she didn't turn us loose soon, we were going to be late opening our place of business. It was already a quarter to nine.

Everyone in Timber Lake who'd been to Books & Biscuits knew she was a great cook. An awesome cook. She was the one we gave credit to for our soul rolls. They were bringing in people in droves. Juicy greens or hoppin' johns inside a flaky, crunchy egg roll wrapper. And then Koby had even come up with dessert ones-sweet potatoes and apple crumble.

I sure was looking forward to anything Mama Zola was going to serve today for the church event. Koby and I had planned on coming back around lunchtime to eat. But now she was nervous just the same. And excited. And driving us crazy.

"I hope I cooked enough." She surveyed the spread of food. Worry etched across her face. "I bet a lot of people will come."

We were in the church's kitchen. A spacious area off the back of the main church in one of the additions. Right behind the baptismal area. Cabinets and counters flanked newer-looking appliances, and the walls were painted a cheery, but faint yellow. We helped Mama Zola unload her foil-topped dishes onto the large aluminum countertop island.

It seemed we were the first ones there and probably the ones with the most food. Most potluck attendees, at least in my experience, only brought one covered dish. She probably had about twenty.

"I think you'll be fine," Koby said.

"I don't know. I ordered four bags of peaches for my cobblers, and they only sent three." She turned and looked at me. "And you ate two of those, Keaton."

"I only ate two peaches." I held up fingers that could have denoted the number or a peace sign. Both gestures I hoped would help my cause. "Not two bags." A sheepish look on my face, I hung my head. I had eaten them. Couldn't deny that. And I knew I was going to hear about it from her. She did not hold her tongue at all. But they were ripe and oh so sweet and juicy.

"I didn't say you ate two bags. But those two made a difference."

"Sorry," I said. Again. But she had moved on.

"Are you sure you got all the pans out of the car?" She looked toward the door as if she could see it from there.

Pete, her designated assistant for the day, although his usual job was in the bookstore with me, had gotten a serving cart from inside the church with the help of Rocko.

Rocko Jackson (no relation to Mama Zola) looked more like a bouncer at a corner bar than the church's designated security and parking lot attendant. Muscles popping out everywhere, buzz cut and dressed all in black-T-shirt, pants and combat boots. He sat in a wooden booth, glass windows on all four sides, centered in the middle of the parking lot. Country gospel on his radio and a plastic container filled with umbrellas. It didn't take much convincing for him to let us in the building early, once we pried him off his cell phone and with Mama Zola's promise of an extra heaping serving of her peach cobbler.

"Yes, we got everything out of the car," my brother answered.

"What about the sweet tea from Biscuits?"

"Our soon-to-be-famous sweet tea?" Koby asked. It was intended to be our signature bestseller when we opened, it and Koby's buttery, flaky golden-brown biscuits, but it had been surpassed by Mama Zola's soul rolls.

"Did you spill anything?" She started lifting the foil covering over the aluminum containers. The smell of the food came wafting out, making my stomach grumble.

"Nothing spilled, Mama Zola," Koby said. "We were careful."

He knew how to handle her. She'd been one of his many foster parents.

We were separated when we were two. I was adopted into a great family, who gave me a loving home and an awesome childhood. Koby wasn't adopted. He spent his formative years in group homes and other people's houses and lives. That was until he got to Mama Zola's. She'd been his real first mom.

Starting when he was thirteen, Koby had put on a sleuthing hat and somehow, over the course of a few years and out of the seven point six million people in Washington State, found me.

But, even with Kobe's skills, our birth mother's present location was unknown, but, now together, we were working on that. Hopefully, though, we'd find our biological mother. I know Koby wanted that more than anything.

In fact, I had written to the King County Adoptions Department of Family Court Services to get any identifying information on her we were allowed by law to have. Morie Hill. That was her name. The reason that Koby and I had different last names. We'd gotten the correspondence from the county around the time when Koby's foster brother, Reef, had been killed. Inside, we'd found out a couple of things that may help on our search for her-like a last known address, where she went to high school and that she had attended a community college. And hits on our genealogy account with other people with matching DNA were also helpful. Meanwhile, the two of us together had started a family business, Books & Biscuits, a soul food restaurant and bookstore, and we were trying to make up for all the lost time from being separated for all those years.

"Oh." Mama Zola placed a hand on her cheek. "I hope I didn't leave anything at the restaurant . . ." Her eyes wandered back toward the door.

"You didn't leave anything," Koby assured her.

"I think you took all the food we had," I said, teasing.

I ran the books side of Books & Biscuits, so I didn't know about what went on over on the Biscuits side. My brother was the cook and manager of our cafŽ. I knew better than to try to give my input into anything on that side. I took my cooking skills after my mother-well, my adoptive mother, Imogene Rutledge-who, I had discovered since eating my brother's and Mama Zola's cooking, could win a place on the Food Network's Worst Cooks in America.

"I didn't take everything," Mama Zola said,...

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Verlag
Berkley
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593336208
ISBN 13 
9780593336205
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

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