Book Spotlight on FOUR LEAF CLEAVER by Maddie Day

In Four Leaf Cleaver, there’s no mistaking Saint Patrick’s Day at Pans ’N Pancakes, where  the shelves of vintage cookware in her southern Indiana store are draped with Kelly-green garlands and her restaurant is serving shepherd’s pie and Guinness Beer brownies. The big event, however, is a televised Irish cooking competition to be filmed on site.

Unfortunately, someone’s luck has run out. Before the cameras start rolling, tough-as-nails producer Tara O’Hara Moore is found upstairs in her B&B room, a heavy cleaver left by her side.

I didn’t have a drop of Irish blood in me, not with parental surnames of Jordan and Fracasso. But I—Robbie Jordan, owner and head cook at country store restaurant Pans ’N Pancakes—could go full-Irish with the best of them.

Tomorrow was St. Patrick’s Day. My team and I had decorated the southern Indiana store with glitter-crusted shamrocks and Kelly-green garlands. We’d been serving scones and soda bread all week, plus a popular beef-and-mushroom shepherd’s pie for a lunch special and Guinness Beer brownies.

The holiday’s big event would happen tomorrow, Monday, when we were always closed to the public. Instead, a roaming cooking competition would take over the space. “Holiday Hot-Off” televised their contests from a different location for every holiday. The name was a bit odd, but when they’d asked to present this contest in my store and told me what they would pay, I’d agreed without giving it too much thought. What little restaurant in a sleepy town doesn’t want national attention?

“We’ll set up there.” Tara Moore pointed a long mauve fingernail at the side wall Sunday afternoon at four. She held a clipboard in her other hand. “Jaden, how many contestants do we have?” she asked her already-harried assistant, whom she had introduced to me as Jaden Routh.

“Eight, Miss Moore.” The kid, who I doubted was older than my assistant’s twenty-one, frowned at his phone with a nose a bit off center.

“And they all know the rules?” Tara was one of those perfectly styled and made-up women with an edge of the imperious about her. Her true height couldn’t be much more than my five foot three, but her black heels and attitude made her seem a lot taller. Her hair was a short honey-colored do with streaks of blond.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

They might know the rules, but I didn’t. “What are the guidelines for the entrants?”

As if bored with the details, Tara moved away from us toward the wall. Two-tops and four-tops were lined up in front of it in our usual arrangement for dining.

“All dishes have to include Hoosier Brewing Company’s Irish stout, no dish can have over fifteen ingredients, and they have to be ready to serve in an hour.” Jaden, speaking fast, gave a quick nervous glance at Tara, his almond-shaped eyes darting as a wild animal’s do when sensing danger.

Maddie Day pens the Country Store Mysteries, the Cozy Capers Book Group Mysteries, and the new Cece Barton Mysteries. As Agatha Award-winning author Edith Maxwell, she writes the Quaker Midwife Mysteries and award-nominated short crime fiction. Day/Maxwell lives with her beau and cat Martin north of Boston, where she writes, gardens, cooks, and wastes time on Facebook.