SUNSHINE CHIEF

A food-loving train aficionado unexpectedly finds himself investigating a murder in this second installment of a literary fiction series.

When food writer, gourmand, and editor of Sunshine Trails magazine Horace Button needs to travel from Palo Alto, California, to Tucson, Arizona, to co-chair a friend’s event, he does so in style. The owner of a pair of vintage train cars, Horace travels south on the rails, accompanied by multiple staff members; his teenage niece, Jane; and her irritating friend FlorabelleSacket.Horace’s main goals for the trip are to eat decadent meals and catch up with his co-chair, society fixture Bunny Lorillard, newly separated from her wealthy husband. He also hopes that Bunny will be a positive influence on Jane and Florabelle, who were recently suspended from school. As the repeat co-chair of the Best Chef Tucson charity event, Horace has been proclaimed the honorary Tucson chief of police so that he can order the arrest of the award-winning chef and then require the victor to cook a dinner for the city’s best and brightest. What Horace could not have anticipated was that the acclaimed chef would be found dead. Or that a bureaucratic mix-up would result in Horace being made the official chief of police, at least temporarily. Much to the consternation of some members of the police force, Horace seizes his new role with gusto and begins investigating the chef’s death. He quickly realizes that Bunny was having an affair with the deceased. Horace also suspects that the easy explanation for the chef’s demise may not be the correct one. Peterson introduced readers to Horace in a previous novel, The Dining Car(2016), and the author’s affection for his larger-than-life bon vivant is palpable. Unfortunately, Horace’s occasional off-putting comments, such as congratulating a police captain from the Dominican Republic on shedding “the indolence and lassitude so engrained in the typical Island Carib,” are not quite redeemed by his heart of gold. But the author’s evocative depictions of meals and vintage trains are captivating, and although the plot is somewhat convoluted, it moves briskly to a clever conclusion.

An intriguing but sometimes uneven mystery with plenty of enjoyable twists and turns.