A Parfait Crime by Maya Corrigan @dollycas #giveaway #recipe

A Parfait Crime (A Five-Ingredient Mystery)
by Maya Corrigan

About A Parfait Crime

A Parfait Crime (A Five-Ingredient Mystery)
Cozy Mystery
9th in Series
Setting – Chesapeake Bay
Kensington Cozies (October 24, 2023)
Mass Market Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1496734599
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1496734594
Digital ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0BT8P2FYK

A granddaughter-grandfather sleuthing duo take on a perplexing new case in the latest culinary cozy mystery, sure to appeal to fans of Diane Mott, Joanne Fluke, and Katherine Hall Page.

At the site of a fatal blaze, Val’s boyfriend, a firefighter trainee, is shocked to learn the victim is known to him, a woman named Jane who belonged to the local Agatha Christie book club—and was rehearsing alongside Val’s grandfather for an upcoming Christie play being staged for charity. Just as shocking are the skeletal remains of a man found in the freezer. Who is he and who put him on ice?

After Val is chosen to replace Jane in the play, the cast gathers at their house to get to work—and enjoy Grandad’s five-ingredient parfaits—but all anyone can focus on is the bizarre real-life mystery. When it’s revealed that Jane’s death was due to something other than smoke inhalation, Val and Grandad try to retrace her final days. As they dig into her past life, their inquiry leads them to a fancy new spa in town—where they discover that Jane wasn’t the only one who had a skeleton in the cooler . . .

Includes delicious five-ingredient recipes!

Recipe

Berry Smoothie Recipe from A PARFAIT CRIME by Maya Corrigan

Set in a historic Chesapeake Bay town, my Five-Ingredient Mysteries feature café manager Val and her recipe columnist grandfather. They share a Victorian house, a love of food and cooking, and a talent for catching killers. Each book contains five suspects, five clues, and Granddad’s five-ingredient recipes.

In the 9th book of the series, Val joins her grandfather in play rehearsals for a community theater production of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. Val replaces cast member Jane, who died in a suspicious fire. Sweet Jane was famous for her parfaits, but after a man’s skeletal remains are found in her freezer, Val and Granddad must solve a crime with as many layers as a parfait. Their search for a killer takes them to an upscale spa where Jane had applied for a job.

Val accepts a catering gig at the spa so she can snoop. She’s hired to run a smoothie bar at the spa’s grand opening festivities. Before the event, she and Granddad are making smoothies while discussing the suspects. I wanted to include a smoothie recipe in the book, but I’d never made a smoothie or even drunk one. I checked out recipes for different kinds of smoothies, including some made with kale and a Greek salad smoothie with tomatoes, cucumber, Kalamata olives, and feta cheese. A dessert smoothie appealed more to me, though the vegetable ones would have been healthier.

Today I’m sharing directions for making a delicious berry smoothie. It meets Granddad’s stringent requirements for a perfect recipe: no more than five ingredients and all of them mixed together at once. I used an immersion blender to whirl the ingredients. This recipe yields two small smoothies or one big one. You can easily double or triple the recipe, but you’ll have to use a standard blender or make the smoothies in batches. Most of the smoothies offered by a chain restaurant near me contain fruit sherbet. This recipe calls for sorbet, which has less fat and a stronger berry flavor than sherbet.

Ingredients

10 ounces of raspberry sorbet

1/3 cup milk (I used 2% milk but any kind of milk or a vegetable-based milk alternative like Ripple would work.)

4 ounces of plain Greek yogurt

1/3 cup fresh or frozen raspberries

1/3 cup fresh or frozen blueberries

Put all the ingredients in a blender and whirl them until the smoothie is the consistency you like.

Adapted from a blueberry smoothie recipe on bellyfull.net

About Maya Corrigan

Maya (Mary Ann) Corrigan writes the Five-Ingredient Mysteries featuring café manager Val and her live-wire grandfather solving murders in a Chesapeake Bay town. Each book has five suspects, five clues, and Granddad’s five-ingredient recipes. In the 9th book of the series, A Parfait Crime, Val and Granddad rehearse an Agatha Christie play with a cast that includes murder suspects. A Virginia resident, Maya has taught college courses in writing, detective fiction, and literature. When not reading and writing, she enjoys theater, travel, trivia, cooking, and crosswords. Visit her website — https://mayacorrigan.com — for book news, easy recipes, and mystery history and trivia.