That Old Black Magic

December 9, 2013
Clark’s suspenseful fourth Piper Donovan mystery (after 2013’s Footprints in the Sand) takes the baker/actress to New Orleans, where she’s thrilled to be working as a guest baker at Boulangerie Bertrand in the French Quarter. Piper also lands an acting role that requires her to play a character entombed alive in a casket. When someone goes on a murder spree in the vicinity of Boulangerie Bertrand, Piper’s boyfriend, FBI agent Jack Lombardi, urges her to get out of New Orleans as soon as possible, but she remains committed to finishing a wedding cake at the bakery. As the body count rises, locals connect the mysterious clues left at the crime scenes to voodoo, and the police consider no one above suspicion, even Piper. Amid a multitude of red herrings, the roller-coaster action builds to a most startling conclusion. Agent: Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, William Morris Endeavor.

January 1, 2014
Piper Donovan travels to yet another notable vacation spot to bake yet another wedding cake and gets tossed into yet another series of murders. While she ponders what sort of cake would best commemorate the nuptials of antique-shop assistant Sabrina Houghton and Leo Yancy, owner of Bistro Sabrina, Piper's staying with Sabrina's friends Bertrand and Marguerite Olivier, of Royal Street's Boulangierie Bertrand, so that she can pick up some authentic New Orleans baking techniques. What could be cozier--especially when Piper, ever the hopeful actress, gets cast as Channing Tatum's girlfriend? True, her character dies in the first reel, and the scene in which she realizes that she's been buried alive brings on traumatic memories of Piper's last brush with violent death (Footprints in the Sand, 2013, etc.). What really turns Piper's stay into a nightmare, though, is the murder of Muffuletta Mike, the neighboring butcher. Will the good people of Royal Street--Sabrina's boss, Ellinore Duchamps, her flirtatious nephew Falkner the tour guide, bartender Wuzzy Queen, street musician Cecil Gregson--band together to repel the killer or turn their backs long enough for Piper to become the next victim? Think Margaret Truman in the Big Easy with a recipe for beignets or a lesser Agatha Christie with an unusually imperiled heroine and just enough hints of voodoo for the tourist trade.

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