Carly Hale is back in her hometown and is making her mark. After years working in a restaurant, she took the leap to open her own place in Bantam Dell, Vermont. She opened Carly’s Grilled Cheese Eatery, and her creative takes on the melty sandwich has earned her some steady customers as well as the high schoolers wanting snacks after their last class of the day.
But with Halloween coming up, Carly is excited to enter the town’s annual Halloween Scary-Licious Smorgasbord Competition. Carly and her sous chef Grant have come up with a fall-inspired grilled cheese on pumpkin bread, served with a choice of dipping sauces. The town sells tickets for the event, and each ticket comes with one ballot, so they can vote on their favorite dish from all the entrants. The winning restaurant gets a plaque and $500, which would come in handy over those cold months when there are fewer tourists in town.
Carly isn’t too worried about the competition, except for Sub-a-Dub Sub’s sandwich. The owner and chef Ferris Menard had been in Carly’s shop earlier that week. Grant had been working in both restaurants, but he had some issues with how lax Menard had been with food safety, so he ended up quitting there and calling the Board of Health. Menard came to Carly’s Eatery and yelled at her, accusing her of calling the complaint in and stealing Grant from him. No matter how much Grant tries to explain that it was all his idea, Menard won’t listen.
Sub-a-Dub has won the competition the last few years, with Menard’s special sauce, a play on oil and vinegar. He won’t give out his recipe for it, but he claims it’s what puts his sandwiches over the top. And after all the cooking and serving and eating at the competition, Menard thinks he’s won. But after counting the votes, there is no winner yet. There is an announcement that there was a glitch with the voting, and they’ll have to let the competitors know later who won.
Later that day, Carly finds out that the glitch with the voting is a surplus of votes. There ended up being more votes in the ballot boxes then there were tickets sold, so clearly some of them were false. But until they can study the votes and try to pick out the fake votes, Menard is winning. But that news pales by what happens the next morning. The police chief shows up at Carly’s place and asks her to come down to the station to talk. Overnight, someone had killed Menard, and with the bad blood between him and Carly, and the fact that Menard died on top of a vampire toy (which the police think he did on purpose) both Carly and her boyfriend Ari are brought in for questioning, since Ari and Carly both dressed as vampires for the competition.
Ari’s vampire cape had gone missing from his truck after he took it off, as well as his work books. And when the police figure out that someone had stepped on Menard’s chest, those boots are even more suspicious, especially when they get returned in a bag, with an anonymous phone call tipping off the police about its location. And when Carly realizes that not only did someone want to kill Menard, they wanted to implicate Ari as well, she can’t help but try to figure out who is behind the crime. But will her investigating make her a target for the next killing, melting her dreams and ending her life?
No Parm No Foul is the second in the Grilled Cheese Mystery series. Author Linda Reilly brings her mystery writing experience and her love of grilled cheese to these stories, blending the charm of small-town New England with cozy murder mysteries and investigations. And once the mystery is solved, it’s time to get down to work with the two recipes at the end, Alvin’s Panko Perfection (it has breaded and fried tomatoes) and the Farmhouse Cheddar Sleeps with the Fishes, an elevated tuna melt.
I like this series a lot. Carly is strong and feisty but she cares for those close to her. There is a good variety of characters around her, and a good mystery. I love the grilled cheese as a background. I think that adds a lot of fun and some texture to the story. But I do wish the writing had a little more energy, more jeopardy to the situation. Sometimes it feels a little dry, and the extra energy could help make it easier to stay engaged with the characters and the crime-solving.
Egalleys for No Parm No Foul were provided by Poisoned Pen Press through NetGalley, with many thanks.
