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

Synopsis

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!

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Guest Post

Staging an Agatha Christie Play Can Be Murder

My Five-Ingredient Mysteries feature café manager Val solving murders in a Chesapeake Bay town with her livewire grandfather, the Codger Cook. Each book has five suspects, five clues, and Granddad’s five-ingredient recipes. The 9th book in my series, A PARFAIT CRIME, has just come out.

My latest book is focused on a community theater production of Agatha Christie’s THE MOUSETRAP. ​​Val joins her grandfather in play rehearsals, replacing cast member Jane, who died in an arson fire. Sweet Jane was known for her parfaits. After skeletal remains are found in her storeroom freezer, Val and Granddad must solve a crime with as many layers as a parfait and with echoes of the crimes in THE MOUSETRAP. When their search for a killer takes them to an upscale spa, they learn that Jane wasn’t the only one hiding her past.

To follow the mystery in my book, you don’t need to be familiar with THE MOUSETRAP.  You’ll learn a little about it, but my book doesn’t contain any spoilers about the play. You’ll have to see or read it to find out who the murderer is at a snowbound guesthouse.

I saw THE MOUSETRAP performed twice many years ago. To prepare for writing about it in my book, I delved into its script. My research also included reading Agatha Christie’s autobiography and Julius Green’s CURTAIN UP – AGATHA CHRISTIE: A LIFE IN THE THEATRE.

Here are five fun facts that I discovered about Christie as a playwright.

1. Agatha Christie is the bestselling fiction writer of all time, but that’s not the only record she holds. Her play, THE MOUSETRAP, is the longest running stage production in the world. It opened in London in 1952 and is still drawing crowds.
2. Early in her career Christie allowed other writers to adapt her books for the stage. She disliked their plays, believing they stuck too closely to the novel’s plot. So she decided to write her own dramatic adaptations. When she adapted the books in which Hercule Poirot solves the mystery, she removed him from the play because he used up too much stage oxygen.
3. Her most successful plays were based on stories that Poirot wasn’t in: AND THEN THERE WERE NONE, THE MOUSETRAP, and WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION (her personal favorite).
4. Christie once wrote, “I find that writing plays is much more fun than writing books.” With plays she didn’t need to write long descriptions of places and people. Nevertheless, she wrote 74 novels, 66 of which are mysteries.
5. On the day she died, London’s West End theaters dimmed their lights for one hour.

When Christie licensed THE MOUSETRAP for production, she specified that no film version could be made of it until the play’s London run was over. Don’t bet on a movie of it anytime soon. There are no restrictions on performing the play in school, community, and repertory theaters. If you’re lucky, you can see a local theater production of it. And if you’re really lucky, you’ll see it in London.

About the Author

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 for book news, easy recipes, and mystery history and trivia.

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