Cozy Mystery Review: Murder on the Menu | Alex Coombs | Old Forge Café Mystery #1

A little getaway to a cozy café in the cold and rainy English countryside takes a deadly turn in Alex Coombs’ Murder on the Menu: the first delicious taste of a mouthwatering new mystery series set in the idyllic English countryside.

About the Book | Murder on the Menu

Chef Charlie Hunter’s arrival in the beautiful Chilterns is the fulfillment of a long-held to open her own restaurant in an idyllic countryside location. The Old Forge sits on the village green (complete with duck pond and flint-faced houses) and seems just the place for the high-quality cooking she wants to be known for.

But instead of rural peace and a chance to lick her wounds, Charlie finds something ugly stirring under the chocolate box perfection. When a prominent local builder is found dead in suspicious circumstances, Charlie the outsider becomes a suspect. And the only way to clear her name seems to be to find out who the real killer is.

Luckily she has her student waitress, a kitchen porter making up in muscles what he lacks in brain and a briskly efficient clairvoyant. Using all the craft Charlie’s learned in kitchens – discipline, timing, preparation and grim determination – she will be as relentless in her quest to bring a murderer to justice as she is in creating the perfect meal. (Synopsis from Goodreads)

Review | Murder on the Menu

I’d categorize Murder on the Menu as an edgy cozy mystery—a bit more violence than is typical with cozies, but very light on the gore and it successfully avoids anything too dark or descriptive. On the spectrum of cozy mysteries, this is a culinary cozy that features a feisty lead in a small town setting and is light on the puns and kitsch but delivers biting humor.

Charlie Hunter is a chef who has relocated from London in the wake of a bad break up to open her own restaurant in Hampden Green, a small village in the English countryside. Old Forge Café is perfect for someone starting out. Charlie is able to live in the small (and poorly heated) quarters above the restaurant, while slowly growing her business.

Charlie has years of experience on the cutthroat London restaurant scene so she knows what it takes to make a restaurant successful. She decides to open in January, knowing business will be slow enough to allow her to manage the kitchen alone to start. The menu is small and relies on food that works for lunch crowd at a café and uses lower-cost ingredients. She has to turn a profit, after all, and that can be hard to do until she is approved for a liquor license and a larger kitchen staff.

She’s able to hire a waitress to manage front of house and lucks out with a fiery university student named Jess. Not only is Jess great at her job, but she provides running colorful (and often quite heated) commentary on the townspeople who come in for lunch. Her first guest is DI Slattery, who informs her of a pork thief in the area and seems instantly suspicious of Charlie. He lets her know in no uncertain terms that her café is on his turf and he has his eye on her.

Business picks up enough that Charlie is able to hire Jess’ large but dull cousin, Francis. Lunch service is steady and Charlie is slowly making steps to grow her business. But the postcard perfect veneer on the village is hiding a dark underbelly that Charlie literally stumbles upon when she encounters the dead body of a prominent local builder, murdered and she is the clear suspect. Charlie realizes she may need to solve the murder herself if she hopes to clear her name, reputation, and keep her restaurant in business.

Charlie is in quite the pickle, as Francis would say. She meets a variety of characters in the village, the most prominent of whom are shady at best. There’s a local drug dealer who may have gotten poisoned at her own restaurant. A group of men with outrageous descriptions who beat her up one night. A handsome yoga instructor who shows her kindness despite Jess’s eye rolls in his direction. A busty woman who seems smart but spaced out. An earl who could be naughty or nice (leaning towards naughty). A councilman with attractive connections around town and a love of a good mousse. A tarot card reader who looks more like a corporate businesswoman than a mentalist. The chef at a local four-rosette restaurant who respects her efforts at a toad-in-the-hole. Patrons at a local country pub who know who she is but aren’t exactly welcoming.

The opening to this book hooked me immediately. Charlie is not a typical lead in a cozy mystery series. She is very flawed yet her humor and good intentions redeem her. Unlike most cozy mysteries that open in the wake of their partner being unfaithful to them, Charlie was unfaithful to her partner—a man who she doesn’t seem to have a bad word to say about (though she does mention the ups and downs of a normal relationship). Rather than moving home to a cute and rambunctious town of family and friends, Charlie has moved to a village where she knows no one.

This is the first glimpse we get of Charlie’s boldness and independence (characteristics that are reinforced throughout the mystery). Jess is an interesting character because she knows all of the town gossip and isn’t short on her own (often negative) opinions of others. It’s unclear how accurate some of Jess’s assessments are, since many of them seem to carry an air of personal grievance. Jess is great at her job and it’s clear Charlie appreciates her, but their relationship isn’t remotely warm and fuzzy (perhaps this is me, writing as an American, though. We are a bit more sensitive and mushy than our friends across the pond!

 The towns people are mean. So mean! So much so that I had to assume the description of the village as idyllic meant the appearance and not the community. Thankfully by the end of the book its clear there is a balance and Charlie (being an outsider) may still have a few people to try to win over. I actually felt quite sorry for Francis, who she hires to wash dishes and help in the kitchen. He tries so hard and he has a kind and humble disposition, but Charlie is accustomed to the cutthroat London restaurant scene and she fits the characteristic of a slightly temperamental chef who may not be known for their patience. I actually worried for much of the book about her treatment of Francis. He makes a lot of mistakes but I also thought some of the tasks she assigned him may require more oversight at first than she provided. I won’t spoil anything but Francis gets a redeeming moment thankfully and is appreciated for the pure person he is!

The mystery is complicated, and it was hard to keep the thread at times because it felt as though it spun in a lot of directions. That was partly intentional though, since it involves several victims and thugs who seem intent on repeatedly beating up Charlie without clear intent. She’s called nasty names more than once, though before you worry too much about her just know that she’s a woman unafraid to throw a punch or swing a rolling pin at someone!

Her relationship with yoga instructor Justin is surprising and it intrigued me. It added a bit of personal element that Charlie needed to soften her character up for the reader. Since Charlie starts out the book alone with no personal connections, the relationships she builds in this story are needed to set up a future book in the series. And I’m certainly interested to know what Charlie will do next!

The mystery is intriguing and slightly more violent than the typical cozy mystery (though not gory or overly dark). Charlie stumbles through learning to sleuth, but her boldness and inherent London skepticism serve her well. Jess and Francis provide some welcome humor and connections for Charlie. The food sounded positively delectable and I loved any time Charlie was in the kitchen or talking about food.

I will absolutely read the next book in the series! Charlie is such an atypical lead for cozy mystery, she will appeal to readers from a variety of genre. The conclusion to the mystery got me with the twist but made sense in retrospect—which always speaks to expert plotting and clues that I may or may not have picked up on!

Thank you to Random Things Tours, No Exit Press, and Bedford Square Publishers for my copy. Opinions are my own. Check out the other stops on the book tour for Murder on the Menu:

About the Author | Alex Coombs

Alex Coombs studied Arabic at Oxford and Edinburgh Universities and went on to work in adult education and then retrained to be a chef,

Alex Coombs was born in Lambeth in south London. Silenced for Good is the first of a new series of novels featuring Hanlon as a PI. He lives in South Bucks but has family in Scotland and spends a considerable amount of time in Edinburgh and Argyll.

He is the author of four previous novels featuring Hanlon in the police ( the DCI Hanlon series). He also writes light-hearted crime fiction as HVCoombs for One More Chapter/Harper Collins.
Visit his website at www.alexcoombs.co.uk or Facebook@AlexCoombsCrime