Cooking for Ghosts: Book I the Secret Spice Cafe Trilogy

by Patricia V Davis

Overview

Do hearts broken long ago forever leave a tangible trace?

A Vegas cocktail waitress. An Indian herbalist. A British chemistry professor. An Italian-American widow. Four unique women with one thing in common: each is haunted by a tragedy from her past.

Cynthia, Rohini, Jane, and Angela meet on a food blogging site and bond over recipes. On impulse, they decide to open The Secret Spice, an elegant café on the magnificent ocean liner, the RMS Queen Mary, currently a floating hotel in Long Beach, California. Rich in history and tales of supernatural occurrences, the ship hides her own dark secrets.

The women are surrounded by ghosts long before they step aboard, but once they do, nothing is quite what it seems. Not the people they meet, not their brooding chef’s mystic recipes, and not the Queen Mary herself. Yet the spirits they encounter help them discover that there’s always a chance to live, as long as one is alive.

Nominated for the Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Cooking for Ghosts is an unforgettable tale of love, redemption, and divine female power.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780989905633
Publisher:	Jerry Hart
Publication date:	10/07/2016
Series:	Secret Spice Cafe , #1
Pages:	350
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.81(d)

About the Author

Patricia V. Davis (Patricia Volonakis Davis) novel, "Cooking for Ghosts: Book I in The Secret Spice Cafe Trilogy," is the first of three novels set aboard the RMS Queen Mary. Davis's non-fiction and fiction works share the theme of "female dynamism," a term she coined which signifies women taking positive action to support each other and better the world around them. To that end, Davis also founded The Women's PowerStrategy™ Conference

Editorial Reviews

"...Complex, rich, and satisfying... Especially recommended for mystery enthusiasts looking for something different in the way of setting, feisty and strong female characters...and a story line brimming with revelations and intrigue that aren't easily predictable. ─ Midwest Book Review

"Davis's patient hand at storytelling threads itself into a perfect and suspenseful character of its own in this wonderfully dark and moody tale brimming with beautiful juxtapositions: modern technology with old world tastes and scents, surface interactions with deep, ghostly otherworldliness, and the common narratives around women and friendships with the ethereal, the intuitive and the feminine."
─Amy Guth, President, Association for Women Journalists Chicago

"So much fun, you won't want to put it down." - Ann Garvin, USA Today Bestselling author of "I Like You Just Fine When You're Not Around"

"In Cooking for Ghosts Patricia V. Davis manages to combine an exuberant lust for the good things in life with an eerie sense of foreboding. This is an exceptional, uniquely gratifying novel. Make yourself something tasty to eat, put your feet up. You're going to be reading for a while. ─ David Corbett, award-winning author of "The Mercy of the Night"

"...Completely amazing..." ─ RT Book Reviews

From the Publisher

Psychologist Perry and business owner Allison teamed up in 2003 to give "non-motivational" seminars to women's groups across the country. This book, which was originally self-published in 2005, collects 50 of their sketches, mostly variations on the theme of women-who-do-too-much. There's the "Perfect Brownie Leader," who planned scores of sophisticated projects for her troop; the scrapbooking obsessive who converted her whole house into a scrapbooking factory; the woman who set up her Christmas tree in July to get good photos for her Christmas cards; and a woman tormented by Martha Stewart's "thought for the day" e-mails. Most essays follow a single format-an excessive woman going to ever-more ridiculous extremes, while the narrator dead-pans, leaving readers cheering for the slacker. This format can work, but becomes tedious on repetition. Perry and Allison are much better when they're less predictable. They do a funny story about packing a frozen turkey in the checked luggage that has nothing to do with overachieving women, a nicely nasty piece about a woman who says "golly" about everything, and an oddly perceptive rant on the subject of husbands who embark on major home repairs just when company's expected. For less-than-perfect women who've had enough of Martha's endless projects, Perry and Allison may be an entertaining antidote. (Mar.)

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