Earlier this week was sat down and spoke with mystery author Leslie Karst about her new book Death al Fresco (Crooked Lane Books; March 2018 hardcover and ebook formats) and yesterday she introduced her series character Sally Solari to us.
Today, we're thrilled that Leslie has shared an except from the book for our readers to enjoy, the first chapter. She notes that what follows is slightly edited from the original, which runs several pages longer.
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ERIC WAS LATE. NOT AT ALL surprising, but it irritated me nonetheless. Normally I would have simply shaken off his tardiness and leaned back on my bench to enjoy the colorful scene playing out around me on the wharf: young fishermen with white plastic buckets of bait at their side, elderly Italian men arguing over their game of bocce, Russian tourists in Giants baseball caps leaning over the railing to snap photos of the noisy sea lions lazing below.
But Eric was my go-to sounding board when I had to get something off my chest, and right now I was itching to tell him the news I’d just gotten from my dad. Even more important, I was hungry, and the aroma wafting up from the two takeout boxes beside me on the bench was making my mouth water something fierce.
Checking the time once more—it was already a quarter past twelve—I dropped my phone back into my bag with a shake of the head and returned to watching the pudgy teenager one bench down who’d been trying for the past five minutes to untangle a hopelessly knotted fishing line. He continued to pick at the line with his blunt fingers, mumbling to himself all the while, and then slammed the rod down on the wooden bench. With an oath, the young man pulled a jackknife from the pocket of his canvas shorts, cut the line, and dropped the tangled mess at his feet.
That made two of us who were annoyed.
Five minutes later, Eric’s slight form sauntered around the corner. Ignoring my sour expression, he avoided a stray bocce ball that had bounced out of the court and crossed to my bench.
“Hey, Sally.” He shoved the boxes aside and took a seat. “How’s it going?”
“I’d be better if you’d been on time. Now we’ll have to inhale our lunch if we don’t want to be late for class.”
Eric patted me on the knee—the sort of patronizing gesture he knew I hated almost as much as having to rush through a meal—and handed me the top box and one of the paper napkins I’d tucked underneath. “Guess we’d better get to it, then,” he said, opening the other container and extracting the enormous crab sandwich within.
I unfolded my own box and spread its sides over my lap. “So, to answer your question,” I said, “it’s not going all that great. My dad dropped a huge bombshell on me this morning. Just when I think I’ve finally extricated myself from Solari’s, he announces he’s taken on that big ol’ sister- cities dinner next month.”
“The one for that Italian mayor who’s visiting? I read about it yesterday in the paper.”
“Uh-huh. It’s a very big deal. She’s the mayor of Sestri Levante, the town in Liguria where the original Sixty Families came from.”
“The Sixty Families?”
“You know, the Italian fishermen who settled in Santa Cruz back in the day? Like my great-granddad Ciro. And it sounds like all sixty families, plus every single one of their friends and relations, are coming to the dinner. Dad says they’re expecting well over a hundred people.” I took an angry bite of my sandwich, causing several chunks of crab to squirt out the sides.
“Wow.” Eric had wisely tucked a napkin into his T-shirt and was using a second to wipe mayonnaise from his mouth. “Where’re they all going to sit? No way can Solari’s fit that many.”
“He has this plan to set up a big tent out here for the event. But that’s not the point.” I popped one of the fallen crab morsels into my mouth before going on. “The point is, he’s guilted me into coming back to Solari’s to help out with all the planning and with the dinner itself.”
“Sucker,” Eric said with a grin, removing his horn-rimmed glasses to clean a speck of mayonnaise off the lens.
“Yep. But it’s not like I had much of a choice. Dad started doing this whole guilt thing about how it’s our ‘heritage,’ what an honor it is for Solari’s to be chosen to host it, how great it’s going to be for business.” I stared glumly at the young fisherman, who had now restrung his line and was casting some live bait—an anchovy, by the looks of it—out to sea.
“Well, he’s right, you know,” Eric said. “The publicity should be enormous. It said in the paper that tons of city officials are going to be there, as well as a bunch of business owners and other big mucky-mucks. Hey, I wonder if the DA’s office will be invited. It’d be nice to get my ticket comped—”
“You’re still missing the point,” I interrupted. “Don’t you see? This is Dad’s way of sucking me back into Solari’s yet again. He just can’t seem to let me go.
“I’m sure you’ll be able to work it out.” Eric stuffed the last of his sandwich into his mouth and smashed the cardboard box flat. “C’mon,” he said, standing up. “You can eat the rest of yours on the way. We wouldn’t want to be late for class.”
Once down on the beach, we headed to the far end, below the lighthouse, where a dozen other art students were already congregated. Its Beach is dog friendly, so as soon as I’d dumped my gear onto the sand, I unhooked Buster’s leash. He immediately took off after a Jack Russell terrier with a tennis ball in its tiny mouth, and the two of them commenced a game of chase.
The teacher, Omar, clapped his hands for attention and we all gathered in a circle. “Okay,” he said, “last week we concentrated on site selection and composition as well as the blocking in of the darker masses and shadows. Today we finally get to the fun stuff—applying the colors!” With a shake of his bleached-blond dreadlocks, Omar pumped his fist like a running back who’d just scored a touchdown.
“As I talked about last time,” he went on, “it doesn’t matter a whole lot what colors you use for your underpainting since it’s mostly going to be covered up later on. But I like to use the blue palette for the cool shadows and yellow ochre for the warm areas, especially for landscapes.” Omar held up the painting he’d started the previous Saturday as a demo, pointing first to the muddy purple areas blocked out in rough brushstrokes for the cypress trees and sandstone cliffs, then to the golden highlights where the light hit the rock.
Once he’d given a short lecture about mixing and applying colors, Omar directed us to set up our easels, and we all did our best to find the exact same spot we’d been in the previous week. As we began mixing colors and dabbing them on our paintings, the instructor circulated among us, providing advice and commentary where needed.
After checking on Buster’s location—he and a plump brown-and-white corgi were now investigating a pile of kelp that had washed up onto the beach—I clipped my work-in-progress to my easel and opened my box of paints. I leaned down to extract the tube of yellow ochre and as I stood back up, I saw that Buster and his friend were now knee-deep in the kelp, digging furiously at the center of the pile.
Oh, no. Any second now, he was going to roll over and go for a full-on scent bath in the stinky mess. “Buster, no! Leave it!” I hollered, knowing damn well that even if he could hear me from halfway across the beach, the dog would feign deafness.
Setting the tube back down, I darted over the sand toward the two dogs, continuing to shout. “No! Leave it!”
Even once I got to the edge of the kelp, where I knew he could hear me, Buster wouldn’t budge. He and the corgi continued to paw at the seaweed, now shoving their muzzles deep into the dense, brown mass.
Cursing the stubborn dog, I stepped gingerly onto the pile. Rubbery bladders popped under my feet and I was immediately swarmed by thousands of tiny flies. “Buster, you are so going into a time-out,” I said as I grabbed hold of the dog’s collar. “What the hell is so interesting down there, anyway? Not that I even want to know.”
I yanked his nose out of the kelp and was about to turn away when a glint of silver caught my eye. Was that jewelry? Holding my breath, I bent down to get a better look at the piece of metal reflecting the light of the afternoon sun.
It was a wristwatch. A pretty expensive one, too, by the looks of it. I reached down to take hold of the watch, but it was entangled in the mat of kelp. Pulling harder, I finally succeeded and the watch came free from the seaweed.
And with it, the arm to which it was still attached.
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Photo provided courtesy of
Leslie Karst
The daughter of a law professor and a potter, Leslie Karst learned early, during family dinner conversations, the value of both careful analysis and the arts—ideal ingredients for a mystery story. Putting this early education to good use, she now writes the Sally Solari Mysteries (Dying for a Taste, A Measure of Murder, Death al Fresco), a culinary series set in Santa Cruz, California.
An ex-lawyer like her sleuth, Leslie also has degrees in English literature and the culinary arts. She now spends her time cooking, singing alto in her local community chorus, gardening, cycling, and of course writing. Leslie and her wife and their Jack Russell mix split their time between Santa Cruz and Hilo, Hawai’i.
For more information about the author, please visit her website at LeslieKarstAuthor.com and her author page on Goodreads, or find her on Facebook and Twitter.
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Death al Fresco by Leslie Karst
A Sally Solari Culinary Mystery
Publisher: Crooked Lane Books
It’s Indian summer in Santa Cruz and restaurateur Sally Solari decides an open-air painting class is the perfect way for her to learn more about Paul Gaugin, the inspiration for her family’s newest restaurant. But the beauty of the Monterey Bay coastline is shattered when Sally’s dog Buster sniffs out a corpse tangled up in kelp.
The body is identified as Gino, a local fisherman and a regular at the Solaris’ restaurant until he disappeared after dining there a few nights before. Witnesses claim he left reeling drunk, but his waitress swears Gino only had two beers with his dinner. And then the fingers begin to point at Sally’s dad for negligently allowing an inebriated customer to walk home alone at night.
From a long menu of suspects that includes Anastasia, the mysterious woman who dined with Gino that fateful night, Gino’s deckhand Bobby, and bocce player Frank who accused Gino of cheating, Sally must serve up the tall order to clear her father’s name.
— Death al Fresco by Leslie Karst
