Lobster, Lies, and Lil' Beefy

A Small Town Culinary Cozy Mystery with Cat

De: Maisy Marple

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

The Lobster Boil Weekend was supposed to be the biggest celebration Pelican Harbor had ever seen—four hundred people, an antique copper kettle, and sixty quarts of Blair Whitcome's Cajun lobster bisque. What Blair didn't plan for was opening her walk-in cooler at four in the morning to find the man who delivered the lobster dead inside it, with someone else's handwriting in her temperature log and a sharpened oyster knife she'd never seen before. Now her kitchen is sealed, her festival booth is the talk of the harbor, and Detective Delcambre is building a case against a hot-tempered young deckhand whose alibi has a suspicious gap right in the middle of the night. Blair knows the evidence points the wrong way. She just has to prove it before the wrong person ends up charged—and before whoever actually did this decides she's been asking too many questions.

What starts as a missing temperature log entry leads Blair deep into the Fishermen's Co-op's books, where the numbers have been quietly lying for eleven years. The victim had been spending his afternoons in the filing room, going through old fuel contracts nobody else had looked at in years, sending certified letters to make sure the right people had copies of what he'd found. He was the kind of man who believed in giving people a chance to do the right thing before he went public. It cost him everything. Now Blair is following his paper trail through property records, key logs, and a maintenance shed where someone worked a blade to a point on an industrial grinder—not the work of a scared young deckhand, but the work of someone patient, organized, and very accustomed to being the most careful person in any room.

Lobster, Lies, and Lil' Beefy is a warm, funny, food-filled mystery set against the lantern-lit backdrop of a Louisiana waterfront festival—where the bisque sells out before noon, the harbor gossip travels faster than the tide, and one extremely large tabby cat has an inexplicable talent for being exactly where the evidence turns out to be. Fans of cozy mysteries with a strong sense of place, satisfying evidence-based resolutions, and a cat who treats every crime scene like a personal opportunity will feel right at home in Pelican Harbor.