Seram
Dani Tankelevich’s cosy mystery is perfect for chilly winter nights.
It’s been rather cold down here in Australia. My despotic spell check will doubtless abuse me for the addition of the word, ‘rather’ and say something insulting like, ‘for more concise language consider removing the unnecessary adverb ‘rather’. But I won’t. And I won’t for the simple reason that a few of my readers live in New England and Colorado and if a girl living in Sydney complains about the cold down here, in the presence of people up there, well, you see how foolish that looks.
It felt cold to ME. And this is just the sort of weather for reading mystery novels. Why things going bump in the night and Uncle Ichabod guzzling down poison from an antique brandy decanter has a cheery, warming effect on a cold, dark winter’s night, I have no idea, but it does.
And this year, I got awfully lucky because one of my very favourite writers ever, decided to launch out into the genre of mystery stories.
When I heard that Dani Tankelevich had written another book, I began to make quite a pest of myself. Wisely, he didn’t tell me it was a mystery because if he had of, I would have made a VERY big pest of myself indeed. How many 16 year olds can write so well? Not many. Certainly I couldn’t at 16. Although I thought I could.
And this story turned out to be, (to quote Roald Dahl) an absolute whizz bang. Which is to say, I liked it very much.
Seram
is a man with an enormous talent for cooking and a grim opinion on most humans. He runs a celebrated restaurant. So celebrated in fact, you won’t get a table until you’ve filled out a huge questionnaire. If he likes your answers (and don’t count on it) he’ll let you try his delicious delicacies. But things start to go a bit strange when the famous food critic, Elaine Pipkin, unwisely decides to give Seram an undeserved low rating for a bit of fun. What follows is an exciting, twisting and often funny adventure with an ending I never saw coming.
If you’ve got a chilly evening to fill up, (or even a warm afternoon by the pool) I highly recommend Seram.
Because if I had known what a good mystery story it was going to be, I would have made such an obnoxious pest of myself to the author, urging him to hurry up, I honestly couldn’t have blamed him if he decided to put ME in a mystery story, right on the first page for the sole purpose of shoving of a cliff.
