CULINARY MYSTERIES 
Virginia Rich may have started the trend culinary mysteries with The Cooking School Murders featuring widowed Virginia Potter. She continued with The Baked Bean Supper Murders and The Nantucket Diet Murders. After Rich's death, Nancy Pickard finished The 27 Ingredient Chili Con Carne Murders, of special interest to us because it's set in Sonoita, Arizona
Since then, mysteries with food prominent in the background or foreground are becoming more popular every year. The great majority are cozies. Those that aren't actually comic nevertheless de-emphasize physical violence and usually have an upbeat tone. There are exceptions, of course, as noted below.
Recipes Included
Claudia Bishop's popular series features sisters Sarah and Meg Quilliam, who together run the Inn at Hemlock Falls. A Taste for Murder was the first of five; Death Dines Out has just appeared in paper. Each book contains a recipe from the Inn.
Philip Craig's series featuring J. W. Jackson describes good food, its preparation, and its enjoyment without getting down to "add one tablespoon." Beginning with A Beautiful Way to Die, the books' believable characters and satisfying plots are enhanced, not overshadowed, by the cooking background. The setting is Martha's Vineyard; the gastronomic focus seafood. The most recent, A Deadly Vineyard Holiday, is the first to include recipes.
Diane Mott Davidson's detective, Aspen caterer Goldy Baer, has a pragmatic style of coping with disasters, in and out of the kitchen, and though the recipes, interspersed throughout the book, may call for special ingredients, the techniques are not difficult. Catering to Nobody was the first of the series. The Grilling Season brings the number in the series to six and adds an index to the recipes.
Tamar Myers's Pennsylvania Dutch series, starting with Too Many Cooks Spoil the Broth, features Magdalena Yoder and her picturesque PennDutch Inn. As one might expect, the cooking is simple but good. The most recent book, Just Plain Pickled to Death, has wedding feast recipes, from soup to nuts.
Katherine Hall Page provides recipes at the end of the book so you don't have to leaf through the pages to find them. Her detective, Faith Fairchild, is a caterer, but the recipes sound like an ordinary busy person could actually make them. The Body in the Belfry is the first of eight: The Body in the Fjord takes Faith' friend Pix Miller and Pix's mother to Norway.
Rex Stout's classic Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin books don't include recipes (except for Too Many Cooks), but do have a lot of information about food and eating, and the Nero Wolfe Cookbook takes some of those wonderful meals and translates them into actual high-cuisine recipes. Includes photographs of New York in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, as well as scenes and quotations from the books.
Laura Jane Temple's lively series, beginning with Death by Rhubarb, has lots of recipes interspersed throughout the chapters, each tied to the plot of the book. Revenge of the Barbecue Queens, for instance, offers barbecue recipes, and A Stiff Risotto which centers on a cooking competition, gives a recipe from each of the competitors.
Gastronomic Mysteries
Daniel Akst's St. Burl's Obituary is not a cozy, but a darkly comic thriller exploring the links between appetites and identity. It centers on three-hundred pound obituary writer Burleigh Bennet who accidentally stumbles into a gangland slaying.
Christine Andreae's Lee Squires is an English professor, a poet--and a Montana camp cook. The pristine Montana settings are vividly presented, and there's lots of information about how to eat well, with minimal environmental damage, miles away from the kitchen. Trail of Murder is the first in the series
Michael Bond's lighthearted mysteries, set in France, star Monsieur Aristide Pamplemousse, gastronome par excellence. Unfortunately, . . . Stands Firm and . . . the Secret Mission are the only two still in print.
In Gone Bamboo, by Anthony Bourdain, one of the main characters is a chef, but the focus of the book is on comic, Elmore Leonard-style ganster antics. Bourdain is himself a chef in New York. (His first book, Bone in the Throat, was a New York Times Notable Book).
In A Deadly Pate, Ruth Furie sends Fran Kirk to France to investigate the death of a chef, the husband of her aunt-by-marriage.
In The Mystery Roast, Peter Gadol blends coffee, art, intrigue, and urban romance together in witty, stylish tale of the New Yorkers who gather at the Mystery Roast Café and fall under the spell of strong coffee and ancient desire. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly praised the book's "comic turns and virtuoso storytelling. . . . a brew of exotic strains whose strengths and nuances connoisseurs will enjoy tasting for themselves."
In Fat Free and Fatal , Jaqueline Girdner's Kate Jasper is taking a vegetarian cooking class when one of the students is murdered.
Ellen Hart's Sophie Greenway is a food critic for the Minneapolis Times Register. This Little Piggy Went to Murder is the first in the series; Murder in the Air has just appeared in paper. These are solid, intelligent, traditional mysteries with a strong feeling for character and setting. Hart's Jane Lawless series has a connection with food; Jane owns a restaurant.
Peter King, starting with The Gourmet Detective also offers appreciations of wining and dining, not detailed how-to. The Gourmet Detective (never named) tracks down exotic ingredients, and the books are replete with food facts.
John Lanchester's Debt to Pleasure is a seasonal meditation on food as well as a mystery, a bit like a noir M. F. K. Fisher. It was a New York Time Notable Book of l996, listed for the Booker Prize, and winner of the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel.
Janet Laurence's Darina Lyle hosts a BBC cooking show. This witty, often satiric series begins with Deepe Coffyn; Diet for Death is the most recent.
Peter Mayle's Anything Considered is set in Provence, and follows expatriate Bennett from meal to meal as he impersonates the wealthy and mysterious Julian Poe. Chasing Cézanne takes André Kelley from New York to the south of France to the Caribbean on the trail of an art scam. Mayle never forgets that heroes must eat--and his heroes eat well at each twist of the plot.
Joanne Pence's Angie Amalfi is a food columnist in San Francisco. There are four in the series, from Cooking up Trouble to Cooking Most Deadly.