Cook the Books

January 25, 2010
Conant-Park and Conant’s cookie-cutter fifth Gourmet Girl mystery with recipes (after 2009’s Fed Up
) finds foodie Chloe Carter heartbroken. Her boyfriend, Josh Driscoll, who’s left Boston for a job as a private chef in Hawaii, has invited her to join him there, but Chloe can’t desert friend Adrianna, who recently had a baby, or drop out of her master’s program in social work. In need of money, Chloe becomes the assistant to a cookbook writer, Kyle Boucher, who wants her to visit Boston area restaurants and collect recipes from their chefs. Kyle’s unpleasant father, a celebrity chef, will lend his name to the book. When Chloe arrives for a meeting with Digger, an up-and-coming chef who happens to be a friend of Josh’s, she discovers Digger has died in a fire in his Somerville apartment. Cats provide comfort. Some readers may wish Chloe fretted less about her love life and did more sleuthing.