Simmer Down Read online

  Praise for the Gourmet Girl Mysteries

  SIMMER DOWN

  “The writing is breezy yet polished, the plotting adept, the overall tone funny without trying too hard…The Josh-Chloe pairing is perfect—he loves to cook and she loves to eat.”

  —Cozy Library

  “A delicious new series with engaging characters, a unique pet, a fascinating milieu, the right touch of romance, and lots of fantastic food and recipes—what more could any mystery reader want?!”

  —The Romance Readers Connection

  “The talented authors Jessica Conant-Park and Susan Conant have created a pleasant blend of romance, food, and mystery. Any fan of romance or mystery will find it an enjoyable read with lots of recipes included. Enjoy.”

  —New Mystery Reader

  “This is a fun Gourmet Girl Mystery…Readers will enjoy the heroine’s escapades as she risks her life to uncover the identity of a killer. The mother-daughter team provides the audience with a delicious chick-lit cozy filled with lists, recipes, and asides as Chloe takes on Beantown.”

  —The Best Reviews

  “Packed with delicious recipes…the Gourmet Girl Mysteries have quickly become one of my favorite culinary mystery series.”

  —Roundtable Reviews

  STEAMED

  “This delectable collaboration between Jessica Conant-Park and her mother, Susan Conant, author of the Cat Lover’s and the Dog Lover’s mystery series, introduces an appealing heroine…This scrumptious cozy, the first of a new series, has it all—charming characters, snappy dialogue, and mouthwatering recipes.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “All the right ingredients—fresh characters, a dash of humor, and a sizzling romance. Steamed is hot.”

  —Elaine Viets

  “Famous writer of mysteries involving cats and dogs Susan Conant teams up with her daughter to write a refreshingly charming chick-lit mystery.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Steamed is a gem. It grabs you from the start, as the heroine is witty, down-to-earth, and rolls with the punches. Great competition to anything Diane Mott Davidson has ever offered. I am thoroughly hooked. Top this already winning combination off with some decadent-sounding recipes, and I can guarantee Steamed will be topping the bestseller list in no time.”

  —Roundtable Reviews

  And praise for the novels of Susan Conant

  Award-winning author of the Dog Lover’s Mysteries and the Cat Lover’s Mysteries

  “[An] absolutely first-rate mystery. I loved it!”

  —Diane Mott Davidson

  “Mystery lovers know a champion when they see one.”

  —Carolyn G. Hart

  “A fascinating mystery and a very, very funny book…Written with a fairness that even Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie would admire.”

  —Mobile Register

  “Hilarious.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Fun, fast-paced…with the most eccentric and quirky of characters.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Gourmet Girls Mysteries by Jessica Conant-Park and Susan Conant

  STEAMED

  SIMMER DOWN

  TURN UP THE HEAT

  Dog Lover’s Mysteries by Susan Conant

  A NEW LEASH ON DEATH

  DEAD AND DOGGONE

  A BITE OF DEATH

  PAWS BEFORE DYING

  GONE TO THE DOGS

  BLOODLINES

  RUFFLY SPEAKING

  BLACK RIBBON

  STUD RITES

  ANIMAL APPETITE

  THE BARKER STREET REGULARS

  EVIL BREEDING

  CREATURE DISCOMFORTS

  THE WICKED FLEA

  THE DOGFATHER

  BRIDE AND GROOM

  GAITS OF HEAVEN

  ALL SHOTS

  Cat Lover’s Mysteries by Susan Conant

  SCRATCH THE SURFACE

  SIMMER DOWN

  Jessica Conant-Park & Susan Conant

  BERKLEY PRIME CRIME, NEW YORK

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, North Shore 0632, New Zealand(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The publisher is not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.

  SIMMER DOWN

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

  Copyright © 2007 by Susan Conant and Jessica Conant-Park.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ISBN: 1-4295-6196-3

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME

  Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The name BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the BERKLEY PRIME CRIME design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  To Meg and Kristen

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  RECIPES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Endless thanks to Alexa Lewis and David Grumblatt for their tremendous help with proofreading and to Bill Park for his wonderful recipes. We are also grateful to our wonderful editor, Natalee Rosenstein, and to Michelle Vega.

  ONE

  I hate the week after Christmas.

  Or I used to, anyway. When I was growing up, I kept trying to convince my Protestant family that we were Jewish and consequently had to celebrate Hanukkah for a full week instead of
Christmas for one short evening and a single all-too-brief day. But this year, I, Chloe Carter, have an actual boyfriend, and everything has changed for the better—even my post-Christmas blues. Now, on December 27, I was not, for once, bemoaning the end of carol singing, and it didn’t bother me at all that I’d have to wait almost twelve months to tear through my presents like a six-year-old and then finish off every Christmas cookie in sight. On the contrary, I was brimming with excitement at the prospect of spending New Year’s Eve with my boyfriend.

  So, in the midafternoon, I was seated at my kitchen table pretending to concentrate on work for my social work school internship while actually being distracted by my gorgeous Josh, who was busy cooking. How I got lucky enough to find a chef as the love of my life, I don’t know. What could be better than good food and good sex all rolled into one? Well, not “rolled into one” in the sense that we were smearing food all over each other as foreplay. I mean, ewww! How gross. If I have to watch one more B movie with couples seducing each other with strawberries and whipped cream, or licking champagne off each other, or wagging their tongues in the air to catch dangled tidbits of food, I think I might gag. Still, there’s no denying the food-love link.

  I could seriously stare at Josh for hours while he cooked; he was so focused and serious and skilled and…well, so cute, besides. I couldn’t get enough of his dirty-blond hair, piercing blue eyes, and slim build. And he was loving and funny and loyal. We’d been together only since September, but we were already spending most nights with each other, usually at my place. The apartment he shared with his roommate, Stein, was, like most apartments inhabited by heterosexual males, messy and filthy. Discarded chefs’ clothes were everywhere, and unidentifiable odors emanated from dark corners. With some justification, Josh and Stein blamed the state of their living quarters on chefs’ hours; in fact, neither of them was ever home for long. Whatever the reason, I seldom went there.

  Josh had lost his last chef job right after we’d met and had been struggling to find a new home in which to park his culinary talents. He’d spent the past few months picking up hours by helping out chef friends of his who’d needed him to fill in now and then at restaurant after restaurant. His only steady employment had been at Eagles’ Deli, around the corner from my apartment in Brighton, where he’d been putting in a few days a week. Stein owned the booming deli and always needed the help, so the time Josh put in at Eagles’ gave the best friends and roommates a chance to catch up with each other.

  After chasing after every job lead possible, Josh finally hooked up with a man named Gavin Seymour, who was opening his first restaurant, Simmer, on posh Newbury Street, right in the heart of Boston. Gavin knew that if he was going to open a restaurant, he’d need the hottest location possible—and restaurant locations in Boston don’t get much hotter than Newbury Street. So, when the property became available, Gavin jumped right on it and paid what must have been a fortune for the lease. Nestled in the bottom of a brownstone and located among top restaurants and high-end shops, Simmer was strategically set up for success. And with Josh at the helm, there was no way it could fail.

  In the three weeks since Josh had accepted the position of executive chef, he had been working more or less normal hours, days only, instead of working until late at night as chefs almost invariably did. Opening a new restaurant was a tremendous amount of work, and Josh had been swamped with hiring a kitchen staff, contacting food purveyors, assisting Gavin and the contractor in remodeling the kitchen, and, most importantly, at least in my book, writing a menu.

  I’d been loving his schedule, which meant more time together, but all that was about to change when Simmer opened on New Year’s Eve. For now, though, I’d savor every minute I had with Josh. Technically, I was on winter break from my first year at Boston City Graduate School of Social Work, so I was free to follow Josh around like a lovesick puppy. In fact, although classes had ended, my field placement, as it was called, took no notice of the holidays. Since September I’d been interning at the Boston Organization Against Sexual and Other Harassment in the Workplace, which I’d taken to calling the Organization, as if we were some sort of Mafia cell. The Organization was headed by my supervisor, Naomi Campbell, who was not, of course, the internationally famous supermodel and, in fact, had only a vague notion of who the other Naomi Campbell was. Naomi failed to find anything amusing about her name or, frankly, about much else. Totally driven to rid the world of harassment, she felt that since harassment didn’t break for the holidays, neither should we. The Organization consisted of Naomi and me plus a bunch of invisible board members who made themselves known only by signing hundreds of petitions and notices that Naomi was forever having me type up. We worked out of a minuscule downtown office, and my primary social work contribution so far had been to address the daily feelings of claustrophobia that came from finding myself trapped in the gloomiest, messiest one-window office in Boston. My other major responsibility was to handle hotline calls from women dealing with office jackasses who thought that attempting to fondle a coworker was acceptable behavior.

  Although I completely believed in the work I was doing, Naomi’s extreme dedication and overzealous work ethic grated on me—that and her New Age, hippie, hold-hands-and-tell-me-your-feelings style. One of my New Year’s resolutions was to avoid our morning “staff meetings,” a term that I found ridiculous not only because staff meant Naomi and me, but because meeting meant my being pressured to verbalize some sort of spiritual feeling about what the day would bring. Last week, for example, while gripping my hands in hers, Naomi had closed her eyes and whispered, “Today I will look inside myself to find strength, sensitivity, and courage. I will reach out to my sisters in need and take on their challenges as my own.” Then she’d waited for me to take my turn. I usually snuck in a good eye roll before she opened hers and before I compliantly faked my way through some copycat bullshit.

  I liked some of my classes and parts of my internship, but for the most part I was finding that I didn’t fit in with my earnest, do-gooder classmates. I definitely considered myself a liberal, politically correct twenty-something, but I wasn’t all about marching the streets for causes, petitioning against this and that, or engaging in long discussions about oppression and injustice in the world. So far, I’d managed to keep my true character hidden from my peers. In brief, I wasn’t the most devout social work student there was. I blamed my uncle Alan for my being one at all.

  When my mother’s brother died a few years ago, his will revealed what I considered to be blackmail; I would receive an inheritance only if I completed a graduate program of my choosing. Uncle Alan’s estate would pay for school and give me a monthly stipend distributed by his lawyer, and if and when I earned my degree, I could collect the rest of the money. In other words, Uncle Alan had no confidence in my ability to further my education on my own. Not that I’d actually had any plans of my own ever to poke my head into a classroom again after college, but I wasn’t about to turn down a lucrative opportunity just because of a few insults about my ability to get my act together and find a career. After rifling through piles of graduate school catalogs, I’d narrowed my choices to two different easy-sounding programs: one in social work, the other in performing arts. Since my most recent acting experience had been in elementary school when I’d played Nana the dog in Peter Pan, I’d figured that a career on the stage was out. Plus that snot-nosed Eric Finley had called me Nana until we’d graduated from high school. Who knows? Maybe I would’ve been a brilliant thespian if it hadn’t been for Eric’s tormenting me.

  So, social work it was. I was getting through mostly unscathed and enjoying the advantages of a school schedule versus some dreary nine-to-five job. And having a winter break meant that I could sit at home today and admire Josh as he worked on his food. The new restaurant, Simmer, wasn’t quite finished. As of today, there was still no electricity in the kitchen, so Josh had been working out of my condo to test dishes and feed recipes into his laptop. Although I did
n’t exactly have a gourmet kitchen, even my small space was better than the eat-in kitchen Josh had at his apartment. By some act of God, I’d been able to convince my landlord, Chuck, that I’d move in only if he installed a garbage disposal and a small dishwasher. Not realizing that he could’ve rented this condo unit to about a million other people for more money, even without the new appliances, he’d agreed. And with Josh cooking out of here, I was even happier than ever to have those two kitchen accessories. He’d been testing a lot of recipes this month. Three or four times a week, he’d come over with bags loaded with beautiful fresh produce, meat and fish wrapped in white butcher’s paper, wine for reducing in sauces (and drinking), fresh pasta sheets, and packages of aromatic herbs. I’d learned that a chef’s grocery shopping looked distinctively different from mine. When Josh shopped for the restaurant, there was nothing frozen or precooked; everything was fresh and raw and gorgeous. Since Gavin was picking up all the shopping costs, Josh spared no expense in buying the highest-quality ingredients he could from specialty shops around the city. And I was a delighted taste tester.

  Today, he was not, however, testing recipes but preparing food to serve at the Food for Thought event going on tomorrow night. The annual charity fund-raiser, which was held at Newbury Street art galleries, paired social service agencies with local restaurants. Inside each of the posh galleries, one agency and the restaurant paired with it got to set up a booth to showcase services and food. When Naomi had first brought this event to my attention, my inclination had been to run screaming from something that was going to interfere with my vacation. I quickly realized, though, that Food for Thought was not some bothersome and negligible event; it was a high-class, high-publicity Boston affair and was the perfect opportunity to promote my boyfriend’s talents. Boston magazine always did a piece on it, and local restaurant reviewers would definitely be there. Gavin and Josh were thrilled to be involved, and the timing coincided perfectly with Simmer’s grand opening. It took only a little conniving to have the Organization and Simmer assigned to each other. Our tables were to be featured at the trendy Eliot Davis Gallery, which was just a few doors down from Simmer. Oh, and, yeah, I could help promote the harassment hotline I was in charge of. I keep forgetting that.