Buffalo West Wing by Julie Hyzy
This is a solidly crafted cozy mystery with a unique niche–the amateur sleuth is the chief White House chef. I hadn’t heard of this before, but I found a couple of copies and I like a cozy mystery as much as the next person so I picked it up for some easy distraction.
The book started out a little rough-the author hits you with a ton of names, and everyone has minor variations in their title that apparently construe major variations in their relative power. She eschews politics by having the presidents be of unnamed political parties and the bad guys be from made-up countries with fundamentalist (they don’t say Islam, but you get the gist) regimes. No one even dies in this book, which is pretty amazing for this type of genre, that the author trusts there’s enough tension to keep us caring without a still-warm body left in the library with a candlestick and Colonel Mustard as the only witness.
In fact, this is one of the coziest cozy mysteries I’ve read. Most of the conflict comes from internal politics, when the new presidential family brings their personal chef Victor, who believes that he’s been brought in to run the kitchen and our protagonist has to put him in his place. The personalities are slightly exaggerated so I was reminded of the tension in High School Musical, where you know right off the bat who you’re supposed to like or dislike and there’s not much room for complexity of character. There are some romantic tensions, when the protagonist’s ex-boyfriend is there, working under her new flame, and they’re all secret service types so the reader can imagine delicious clean-cut and well-built men while imagining delicious crab ravioli or mixed berry cobbler. There are even recipes in the back, for those who care about that sort of thing.
So, I liked the book, though this isn’t my number-one genre. It is what it is. It’s escapist fantasy. People rarely get dirty or tired, the fights aren’t serious, no one is burned out or lonely or questioning their choice in life. Culinary cozy mysteries are an entire sub-genre, but having them at the White House put a unique spin on it, and this was well-crafted enough to amuse fans of the genre while waiting at the doctor’s office or while waiting for your kid’s gymnastics lesson to be over.
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