Spiced to Death

Name: Spiced to Death
Brand: HighBridge Audio
Availability: InStock
Author: Peter King
ISBN: 9781696605724

Author: Peter King

Series: Gourmet Detective Mysteries #2

Narrator: Peter King

Unabridged: 8 hr 57 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Highbridge Audio

Published: 06/08/2021

Categories: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Cozy, Cozy Culinary

Synopsis

"This appealing detective serves up nuggets of culinary trivia and wry food humor" (People).

In the days of Marco Polo, men risked their lives for spices. And in an age when black pepper was so valuable that it was sold one peppercorn at a time, there was no spice more valuable than the legendary Ko Feng. Known as the Celestial Spice, it supposedly vanished five centuries ago, and its name lives on only as culinary myth. But now a sack of it has turned up in New York City, and the leading experts of world cuisine will kill for a taste. When London's finest gourmet detective proclaims the mysterious spice authentic, this sack of weeds becomes the most valuable substance on earth, worth thousands of dollars per gram. But soon the spice vanishes, one of his colleagues is murdered, and the detective is forced to dive into New York's culinary underworld. His palate may be refined, but this gourmet knows how to fight dirty.

About Peter King

Peter King (b. 1922) is an English author of mystery fiction, a Cordon Bleu-trained chef, and a retired metallurgist. He has operated a tungsten mine, overseen the establishment of South America's first steel processing plant, and prospected for minerals around the globe. His work carried him from continent to continent before he finally settled in Florida, where he led the design team for the rocket engines that carried the Apollo astronauts to the moon.

In his spare time, King wrote one-act plays and short mystery stories. When he retired, in 1991, he wrote his first novel, The Gourmet Detective, a cozy mystery about a chef turned sleuth who solves mysteries in the kitchen. King followed it with seven more books starring the character, including Dying on the Vine and Roux the Day. In 2001 he published Jewel of the North, the first of three historical mysteries starring Jack London. King lives in Sarasota, Florida.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Ronna on November 15, 2014

Don't know what it is about the Gourmet Detective books that interest me so, but they definitely intrigue me. This one was better than the first one. Perhaps because the mystery was much better--a closed room type. I also love all things Asian cooking, and the spices, meals, and restaurants spoken a......more

Goodreads review by AngryGreyCat on August 19, 2019

Spiced to Death is the second in the Gourmet Detective series. I really enjoyed the first one simply titled, The Gourmet Detective, but for some reason this fell flat for me. There were tons of characters as our hero travels to New York to authenticate a shipment of a recently rediscovered spice. I......more

Goodreads review by Karen on June 09, 2020

The story wasn’t bad, and the food descriptions are great, but i never saw so many racial and ethnic stereotypes in the same book. And the only female characters with any depth to them are the beautiful ones. The whole thing was kind of appalling.......more

Goodreads review by Glen on March 27, 2020

The Spice Detective is hired to authenticate Ko-Feng, a spice that went extinct centuries ago. Nobody really knows what it tastes like. After the authenticating process, the spice disappears from an armored truck, and...Murder! The Spice Detective tries to get to the bottom of things. Diverting.......more

Goodreads review by VickiMNE on September 13, 2021

Enjoyable cozy mystery set in the US this time. We picked up a Kindle set of books 1-4 for cheap so will read them all, spacing them out so as not to get bored with the author's "formula" and food descriptions!......more