The Baklava Betrayal

A master pastry chef is poisoned in front of one hundred and eighty witnesses. Every one of them was watching. Not one of them saw it. A culinary cozy mystery with recipes.

Retired opera diva Monique Dubois came to Istanbul to eat, sleep late, and offer opinions on nothing whatsoever. Instead she is seated at the judges' table of the Golden Tray - a hundred-year-old baklava competition between two families who have not spoken in forty years - with her disapproving black cat Kahlusha in her lap.

Then Bülent Şahin takes the first piece from his own tray, as a century of tradition demands, and is dead before the ambulance clears Karaköy.

The police call it his heart. The festival reopens on Tuesday.

But Monique tasted that syrup two nights earlier, off a spoon in a back kitchen, and it was the finest thing she had eaten in eleven years. On the day he died, it tasted of nothing but rosewater.

Rosewater covers a great many sins.

When the dead man's disinherited nephew is arrested on evidence that fits a little too neatly, Monique starts asking a different question from everyone else. Not who hated him - half of Istanbul did. But whose hand could correct that syrup at the last moment, in front of everybody, and have not one person in the room think it strange?

The answer has been standing at the end of the bench for forty years, in an apron, doing whatever was needed. Everyone saw her. Nobody looked.

The Baklava Betrayal is a fair-play mystery about credit, erasure, and the people who hold the whole enterprise up from underneath. Every clue is on the page. The solution will cost Monique more than she wants to pay.

For readers of Louise Penny, Richard Osman and Martin Walker: warm, witty, elegantly plotted - and unafraid to break your heart.

Includes Perihan's şerbet recipe, in Monique's own words.

Book Three of the Monique Dubois Mysteries. A new country, a new dish, a new impossible crime. Each book stands entirely alone.