I am for sure intrigued!

Synopsis

A deadly feast, a mobster restaurant and a family get-together with fatal results.

Savour the spicy tang of dark and twisted tales in Pass the Cyanide, a follow-up to the award-winning collection of culinary mysteries, Add Cyanide to Taste.

From an old friend hiding a deadly secret to a ravenous house with an appetite for friends, Špiljak masterfully blends the allure of food and the thrill of mystery. Each story is a rich and satisfying serving of crime, with a twist that will leave you wanting more.

A must-read for fans of culinary noir and foodies who love a pinch of danger with their suspense. All recipes included are cyanide-free.

GuestPost

Hooked on culinary noir

When I wrote ‘Add Cyanide to Taste’ two years ago, I did it for my own pleasure, without worrying about the genre. Publishing, however, requires labels, only, which one to pick? Although my short stories were culinary mysteries, they weren’t exactly cosy, neither were they detective fiction. Some were classic hard-boiled mysteries, but there was also dark speculative fiction and horror.

So, how to label them and make sure that my ghosts and haunted houses don’t horrify unsuspecting readers? I didn’t want to promise a cosy read, only to sneak up behind the reader’s back and shout ‘booo’ when they put their feet up.

So I came up with culinary noir, feeling rather smug about having invented a new genre.

Noir, after all, allows for a certain mischief and darkness, while the culinary is the binding element of my stories. It means there’ll be some blood, some spooky stuff, ghosts and creepy dolls and a bit of magic, too.

Then, some months later, while preparing for the book launch, I discovered that culinary noir existed before I’d ‘invented’ it. One or two articles referenced it, but there were not so many books that carried the label. 

So I hadn’t made it up after all?

Rather than being disappointed, I was relieved. If the genre already existed, then it came with at least a few readers, who liked stories like mine. 

Once ‘Add Cyanide to Taste’ came out, it was clear there were more than just a few readers. People liked the stories and were happy to add culinary noir to their bookshelves. The book won an award and kept finding new readers. Some of them were book bloggers, and some of them tagged me in their review and asked for a sequel.

Until then, I hadn’t seriously considered writing another culinary noir collection, but I paused all the same and considered the request. 

Could I write another bunch of dark culinary mysteries? Yes, I certainly could, because I had quite a few story ideas already.

Did I want to? 

Well, yes. Writing those stories was fun and easy. The only problem was that I was kind of already in the middle of writing something else, having promised my time and attention to a bunch of entirely different stories.
What to do?

The only thing that made sense: I followed my gut feeling, abandoned the plans and started working on a new collectionof culinary noir.

‘Pass the Cyanide’ has kept the spirit of ‘Add Cyanide to Taste’, but brought fresh stories and characters. There are two speculative fiction stories with my own spin on vampires, a few whodunnits and a classic noir story set in Belgrade, my current hometown. There’s a holiday-themed story inspired by TikTok and there’s a story featuring artificial intelligence. Theidea for the latter came after a brief consultation with ChatGPT3. I’ve asked the tool to generate a few culinary mystery plot ideas which involved artificial intelligence, curious to see whether it would cast itself as a hero or as a villain. It did neither, and cast itself as a sidekick, a smart move on ChatGPT’s side. Though I didn’t like any of its suggested plots, I started contemplating my own plots featuring artificial intelligence. The result is ‘Ernest’s Choice’, the opening story of the collection.

I wanted to include the recipes, too, picking a few dishes from the stories, including cocktails, which might have had something to do with the blistering summer heat while writing the stories.

Even after finishing the book, I’m far from being done with writing in the genre. If anything, I am hooked on culinary noir and already planning the next book in the series.  

I’m calling the series ‘Cooking with Cyanide’, which is guaranteed to freak out the online bots, return some interesting personalised ads, and frighten my dinner guests, especially when asking about allergies.

But hey, that’s a small price to pay for the joy of writing new stories filled with delicious mayhem.

Willing to give them a try?