Footprints in the Sand by Mary Jane Clark

“Here’s one ‘killer’ Alex Cross always loves to catch - Grandma’s Killer Cake! A special family recipe dating from the 1940s, this decadent cake seems to get better with age it is tastier on day two. He lives in Palm Beach with his wife, Sue, and his son, Jack. He supports getting kids reading through scholarship, Book Bucks programs, book donations, and his website,. James Patterson has sold 300 million books worldwide, including the Alex Cross, Michael Bennett, Women’s Murder Club, Maximum Ride, and Middle School series. The following recipes are excerpted from “The Mystery Writers of America Cookbook,” edited by Kate White, and reprinted with permission from Quirk Books. We’ll also share a couple of lethally good recipes from two other Florida mystery writers – Mary Jane Clark and Rita Lakin – whose contributions appear in the book published two weeks ago by Quirk Books. That said, Patterson’s “killer” chocolate cake won’t kill you, but it may slay your senses.

“Agatha Christie used poison to fell a character in over half of her mystery novels.” “Authors from Arthur Conan Doyle to Dorothy Sayers to Scott Turow have killed off characters with food or drinks laced with poison,” writes White, a suspense writer and past editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine. But isn’t this to be expected? As editor Kate White notes in the introduction of the newly released collection of recipes, countless scenes in mystery novels “mix food and murder.”

When our eyes landed on its severe mug shot but richly frosted image on page 148 of “The Mystery Writers of America Cookbook” (Quirk Books), we wanted to slice into it and devour it with a side of those slashed berries.Ī killer cake, like a classic mystery novel, takes you to some wicked places. Not just any ordinary killer cake, this is the one author James Patterson calls Grandma’s Killer Chocolate Cake. In truth, we’re conspiring to bake a cake. We only seem to be trapped in a bad crime novel. Doom jazz rises from a speaker and hangs atop a spatter of ingredients that could be a frame from a CSI episode: A mess of granulated sugar, flour, butter and melted bitter chocolate that turns everything it touches a shade of tomb black. There is, however, a large butcher’s knife, stained in the blood of slashed berries.

The butler is nowhere near the scene at the time of the incident.

Footprints in the Sand by Mary Jane Clark