The Poison Chef Series
A psychological thriller for readers who like their suspense plated beautifully and served cold.
Clara Hastings lives with seven women inside her head to survive one career, two Michelin stars, and the exhausting burden of being unforgettable.
Manhattan worships her: glamorous, merciless, and exquisitely unstable. Her restaurants are temples. Her dinners are theater. Her knives are sharpened before the guests arrive. Espagnole keeps her ruthless. Velouté wants sex, applause, preferably both before dessert. Hollandaise is terrified of everything, including calories and abandonment. Roux catalogs every insult, glance, stain, and possible felony in compulsive detail. Béarnaise has the emotional maturity of a three-year-old with access to matches. Ganache would prefer that everyone stop discussing trauma long enough to find something with frosting. The seventh voice rarely speaks.
Tonight, the Committee is starving.
Clara's therapist has refused to give her what she wants: attention, adoration, and a medically inadvisable addiction to her body. By midnight, he is dead — arranged in the exact position Clara once imagined him in, surrounded by several intimate little artifacts she would rather not explain to the police. But Clara didn't kill him. At least, she's almost certain she didn't.
Then Detective Nathan Cole walks into the room, and the temperature rises without anyone touching the stove. He doesn't accuse her. He simply lowers his voice, lets his eyes travel over her, and reminds everyone present that Clara Hastings knows precisely how much poison it takes to ruin a man without spoiling the sauce. Across Manhattan, a psychopath named Orchid is keeping time, planning another final afternoon course by course, minute by minute. Someone is framing Clara. Unless the quietest woman in her head has finally developed a taste for murder.
"If I'm going to lose my mind, I'd rather it happen somewhere edible."
