Samantha Barnes is hoping that her notoriety as a viral YouTube star for slicing off her now-ex-husband’s fingertip during an ill-advised knife fight has died down so she can concentrate on her life as a restaurant critic and maker of far tamer accompanying food videos. With the holiday season coming up, she’s also preoccupied with…
It is a truth universally acknowledged that mystery readers crave a little holiday homicide along with their eggnog. The holiday puzzler first caught on in 1936 with Mavis Doriel Hayes’s The Santa Klaus Murder. By 1938 Agatha Christie had jumped in with her hugely popular Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, which Robert Barnard called a “welcome interruption…
Samantha Barnes’s life has just turned upside down. From being the head chef of a successful restaurant in New York City working alongside her bad-boy chef husband, Stefan, she’s suddenly unemployed and divorced after a volatile, violent argument the two have outside their apartment one evening is recorded by a passerby. The video hits the…
How does one account for the sheer number of mysteries in which food, both for good and evil, features prominently? So prominently that it’s virtually a character itself—or at least a character witness. Perhaps it’s because food (the cooking of it, the eating of it, the sharing of it) offers so many lovely options for…
