ISBN-10:
ISBN-13: 978-
Publisher: Penguin Group
Line: Berkley
Release Date: Apr 1, 2014
Pages: 304
Retail Price: 7.99
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Genre: Mystery
Rating:
Zoe Chase always wanted to own her own restaurant—but first, she’ll have to serve up a heaping helping of meals on wheels, with a side of mystery…
When she’s once again passed over for a promotion at work, Zoe decides to take the big leap and go for her dream. She quits, gives up her fancy digs, and buys a fixer-upper diner in a shady part of town. To keep above water during the renovation, she buys a used food truck to serve the downtown and waterfront of Mobile, Alabama.
Zoe starts to dish out classic Southern food—but her specialty is her deep-fried biscuit bowls that blow traditional bread bowls away.
After a promising start, things start to go downhill faster than a food truck without brakes. First, someone tries to rob the cash register. Next, Zoe is threatened by the owner of a competing food truck for taking their spot. And when the owner ends up dead inside Zoe’s rolling restaurant, Zoe and her sole employee, Ollie, find themselves hopping out of the frying pan into the fryer. They need to find the real killer, before both of them get burned.
Review
For fans of: Riley Adams
Zoe Chase took her friends and family by surprise when she quit her banking job, cashed in her 401(k), and bought a run-down diner. She also purchased a food truck with the thought that she could use the proceeds from her mobile kitchen to fund the renovation of her stationary one. In a city full of lunch wagons, though, it’s going to take more than simply good food for Zoe to attract enough customers to turn a profit. And that dead rival food-truck owner she just found sitting in her driver’s seat? He probably isn’t going to help matters…
Death on Eat Street is the first in J.J. Cook’s new Biscuit Bowl Food Truck Mystery series. I actually wasn't quite sure what to think of this book until I reached the end, largely due to schizophrenic nature of Cook's tale. As you may have surmised from the synopsis, Death on Eat Street finds our heroine estranged from her rich, uptight parents and her rich, uptight boyfriend, largely because they don't understand how Zoe could be so foolish and so reckless as to quit her job, liquidate her assets, and run off to cook for strangers in a dodgy part of town. As it turns out, though, the friends she makes while living in said dodgy part of town prove more loyal, caring, and understanding than she ever could have dreamed. And ultimately, it's Zoe's motley crew of misfits – consisting of a down-on-her-luck cocktail waitress, a homeless chef, a disgraced former ADA, and her crazy swamp-dwelling uncle – that make this book worth reading. These characters are unique, well developed, and never seem to behave quite as you'd expect, and the relationships they share are tender, sweet, and refreshingly non-traditional.
The portions of Death on Eat Street that feature Zoe's parents and boyfriend, however, read like something out of a badly written sitcom. Cook never develops any member of this trio beyond the cardboard cutout stage. Their dialogue is cheesy, the schemes they hatch to bring Zoe back into the fold are absurd, and while Zoe's interactions with them should be fraught with tension and emotion, they instead border on farce. The scenes in which these characters appear stand in stark contrast to the rest of the book, and I likely would have given Death on Eat Street a much higher rating had they been excised completely.
So should you give this book a go? I vote yes. Sure, the mystery itself is somewhat predictable, Cook never successfully convinces the reader that Zoe or any of her friends will be charged with murder, and there are some epic character fails, but if you ask me, the good outweighs the bad significantly enough to make Death on Eat Street worth your while.
Reviewed by Kat