The Secret Spice Café Trilogy
by Patricia V. Davis
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
GENRE: magical realism, women's paranormal fiction, mystery
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
BLURB:
Book One: Cooking For Ghosts
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. They decide on impulse 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.
An Official Pulpwood Queens Book Club Selection, and read by Ann Marie Gideon, COOKING FOR GHOSTS is an unforgettable tale of love, redemption, and divine female power.
Book Two: Spells and Oregano
A mother desperate to save her twin sons, a war veteran in torment, a beautiful young psychic with a terrible secret, a powerful magician with a shattered soul, and a Queen steeped in history and glory. These extraordinary beings cross paths and set off a remarkable chain of events in Spells and Oregano: Book II in The Secret Spice Cafe Trilogy.
Overcome by despair after a trauma when she was sixteen, Sarita Taylor has spent the past ten years isolated and lonely aboard her beloved RMS Queen Mary. Fearful of outsiders, she dedicates her time to managing The Secret Spice Café, now an award-winning restaurant. Until Luca Miceli, a man with a dark past, steps on board.
Patricia V. Davis deftly spins past and present, mystery and magic, into a potent story of passionate longing and family tragedy all at once. Spells and Oregano is a compelling tale of atonement, devotion, and undying love, set aboard one of the world's most magnificent, haunted ships.
Don’t miss Cooking for Ghosts: Book I in The Secret Spice Cafe Trilogy. The Secret Spice Trilogy is an Official Pulpwood Queens Book Club Selection
Book Three: Demons: Well Seasoned
Dare to Believe in Your Power...
A long-lost grandmother. A stay-at-home mom. A comic book fan. A five-year-old girl with a star-shaped birthmark. And nine more.
The cast is bigger, the stakes are higher. When Sarita's grandmother, a Vodou priestess, foresees a terrible evil, Cynthia, Jane, Angela, and Rohini reunite on a heart-rending mission to save all that's precious to them, including the iconic ship, the RMS Queen Mary. They cannot do it alone--the priestess tells them there must be thirteen on the night of the thirteenth moon. in this life-or-death pursuit. Yet, can she be trusted?
Spiced with history and the supernatural, Demons, Well-Seasoned takes us from 1930s Glasgow, to New Orleans and Harlem in the 1950s, to present day southern California, and back again, on a metaphysical voyage that is both exhilarating and poignant. But before you embark upon this final sail with the denizens of The Secret Spice, be warned: expect to lose sleep, and keep tissues at hand. These valiant characters might just stay with you long after their story comes to a close.
Don't miss Cooking for Ghosts, and Spells & Oregano, Books I and II in The Secret Spice Café Trilogy. The Secret Spice Cafe Trilogy is an Official Pulpwood Queens Book Club Selection
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Excerpt Six – from Demons, Well Seasoned
At the exact time Queen Mary of Teck christened her ship—not one second later or earlier—a child was born more than four thousand miles away, just north of the French Quarter in New Orleans, in a grand colonial country home on Bayou St. John.
Here the time was six hours earlier than it was in Clydebank, just ten past nine in the morning. The weather was warm, the humidity thick enough to slice with a Cajun skinning knife. The scents of the marshland were peppery and ripe, and the water wasn’t tainted by shipyard waste. The bayou thrummed with life, slow-moving though it was. The fish and crustaceans swam in languid circles under the surface, making themselves an easy mark for the water snakes and alligators that lay in wait, hidden in the murkiness of the duckweed and hyacinths. The river turtles were a nuisance only to the insects, as they snacked solely on algae, mayflies, beetle larvae and the like. Along the marsh’s edge, in the surrounding foliage of cypress and tupelo trees, muskrats, raccoons, nutria, and other marine mammals scuttled and hid, trying to keep themselves from ending up a bigger creature’s breakfast, while at the same time searching for a meal of their own.
On the bank of the water, the white-columned manor was built in a style that kept hot summers in mind; the ground floor was enclosed with pastel walls of soft brick. The hipped roof was double-pitched and the briquette-entre-poteaux design offered structural support, as well as insulation. The doors were positioned across from one another to keep cool air moving, and extended galleries on both the bottom and top levels of the house kept the sun off the walls and offered outdoor breezeways. An opulent Venetian-style fountain bubbled in the center of the circular drive, birds chirping happily in its dancing spray. Lush gardens boasted sultry-scented magnolias, cerulean-blue irises, camellias as plump and pink as a young woman’s lips, and climbing white roses as old as the bayou itself.
The house was fitted with shutters to provide relief from the Louisiana sun, and in the bedroom where the baby had been born, they were shut tight to keep out lizards and prying eyes. But a determined mosquito could always slip in through the slats. That morning, they hovered over the laboring woman’s bed and crooned for blood.
They got it. The evidence of a birth gone wrong stained the bed linens red and spattered the elegant Persian carpet. It soaked the towels the midwife had tried to stave it with, covered her apron, smeared across her palms, and made dark crescents under her fingernails. Its tangy, metallic essence infused the air, clashing with the aroma of spiced catfish and eggs the cook had been frying up before the pains started. They came too early and too fast, as though Èrzulie Dantòr had made it happen, had wanted the child to arrive that day. And when the infant girl was brought forth, like so much else in the room, she was marked. But not with the blood of life.
Her mother knew two things: she wouldn’t live to see her baby’s second day on this earth, and the white man who thought he was the baby’s father wouldn’t want her.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
AUTHOR Bio and Links:
PATRICIA V. DAVIS's debut novel series, THE SECRET SPICE CAFE, is comprised of three books: COOKING FOR GHOSTS (2016) SPELLS AND OREGANO (2017) and DEMONS, WELL-SEASONED. (2019) The audio books will be released in 2020 by Tantor Media, and narrated by Ann Marie Gideon. Patricia lives with her husband, who is both a poker player and a rice farmer, so she divides her time between southern Nevada and northern California. Say hello to Patricia at her author website: www.TheSecretSpice.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/patriciaVdavis
TikTok: @patriciavdavis
Q&A from Patricia V. Davis
1. What is your favorite part of this book and why?
I can’t give too much away or it would be a spoiler but in Cooking for Ghosts the most fun part of the story to write was when the women and their chef have to conspire together to get rid of ‘their biggest problem.’
2. If you could spend time with a character from your book whom would it be? And what would you do during that day?
All four women of The Secret Spice Café are amalgamations of women I have known and loved. To choose only one is impossible. I would choose to hang out with all four at once—they’re at their best when they’re together—and we’d be aboard the Queen Mary, at their restaurant, of course. We’d be having lunch, on a Monday, the day of the week when the restaurant is closed. Chef Cristiano would cook for us. Anything he felt like making would be delicious, I’m sure.
3. If you could have been the author of any book ever written, which book would you choose?
Pretty much anything by Neil Gaiman
4. Are your characters based off real people or did they all come entirely from your imagination? See my answer to Question #2
5. What made you want to become a writer?
The fact that interesting people and unexpected adventures always seem to come my way. For example, never expected to meet a genuine Vodoo priestess. Or to get to talk with the world's greatest magician. Or to sleep aboard an historic old ship that is haunted. Or to live in Greece and own a bookshop there. Or to have a child, and feel such deep love for him. Or to get my heart broken so badly. Or to fall in love again.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
GIVEAWAY INFORMATION
$25 Amazon/BN gift card
Thanks for hosting!
ReplyDeleteThanks for taking time to share your book with us and it's always a pleasure in our family to learn about a new one.
ReplyDeleteGreat covers!
ReplyDeleteThank you for hosting my trilogy!
ReplyDeleteSounds like a great read.
ReplyDeleteI really LOVE all the covers of the books in this series.
ReplyDeleteSounds like an interesting series.
ReplyDelete