Irene in Danger
Released on November 14, 2021
Irene in Danger (Amazon)
(Kindle and paperback available. Kindle edition is free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers!)
Press Release/Review Copy
Title: Irene in Danger
Pub Date: November 2021
Format: Digital and trade paper
Sales links: Amazon. Irene in Danger: An Irene in Chicago Culinary Mystery (Kindle and paperback available; Kindle edition is free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers!)
Please send notice of any review to Judy Alter at
Synopsis:
Irene Foxglove is back in Chicago, Henny and Patrick are getting married in a week, there’s cocaine floating around, and someone wants to kill the diva chef. Once again, Irene brings murder and mayhem to those around her.
Praises for Irene in Danger:
“This is the first book I have read by this author but it won’t be the last. She takes a mixture of characters, tosses them together, and creates a story that is sure to delight.” —StoreyBook Reviews
“Saving Irene was my first introduction to the work of Judy Alter and the fact that I found myself talking back to the characters (Sorry, Henny, but no legit Italian cook adds oil to pasta unless they’re making aglia e olio) says a lot for how real they felt to me.” —Melissa on Goodreads
“It’s a delectable, fun read. Protagonist Henny James tells the story. Her voice is light, witty and brutally honest. . . .” —Story Circle
Below is an excerpt of the first chapter from this book. Prefer to read offline? You can download it as a document file (.pdf)!
Chapter One
Irene Foxglove was flying across the ocean to ruin my wedding. The wedding was in one week. One short week.
That was my first thought when I read her letter. Dated four weeks earlier, the letter had obviously spent some time lost in the system. So much for international mail!
I read it again, making sure she would really be here tonight. If that letter had been delayed one more day, she’d have been stranded at O’Hare Airport. The thought of pretending to Patrick that the letter hadn’t come until tomorrow flickered through my mind, but I dismissed it as unworthy.
But something else from the letter worried me even more. “I shall want to promote my cookbook while I am there. I am bringing two cartons. Please arrange a bookstore signing. Perhaps I could be on your TV show?”
How like Irene to order me to help publicize a cookbook I thought she’d never write. I was a bit curious about it. But as I tried to digest what Irene’s arrival would mean, I thought back to our—what would you call it? It was more than a business relationship, though I was her gopher for more than a year, and yet it wasn’t quite friendship. Irene relied on me, and I was glad to be of help—up to a point. My wedding may have been beyond that point.
When I, a naïve girl from Texas, accepted a job, sight unseen, as the assistant to a TV chef, I suppose I had glorified visions in my mind. But I never expected Irene, almost six foot tall or so it seemed to me at first, haughty, temperamental, with a fake French accent, and always a diva. She wasn’t even a very good cook—it didn’t take me long to realize that I, with no training, knew more about food than she did, with her precious Cordon Bleu training, which also proved to be fake. Yet, for all her pretension and difficult moods, I became fond of Madame, as she instructed me to call her, and when she was incapacitated, I cobbled together rerun segments to keep her show on the air, and when she and her daughter were in real danger, saving Irene became my mission in life. There was something endearingly helpless about her, as though all that bravado was covering up for the neglected kid from a farm in Minnesota.
The cookbook, however, was another story and did not bring back any fond memories. Before she fled to France, Irene Foxglove had been working, with a whole lot of help from me, on a cookbook tentatively titled Irene’s Favorite Forty and Other Recipes. The truth, as I saw it, was that Irene didn’t want to do the work—she wanted me to do it. The project lagged, though we occasionally corresponded about it in the year she’d been gone. But it was still a rough, very rough, draft in my computer. Apparently not so on Irene’s end.
How and where could I arrange a signing on such short notice and with no book to show? Irene’s expectations, once again, had no relation to reality.
And why this sudden decision? Even four weeks ago, when the letter was dated, it would have been sudden. Months ago, I’d written her that Patrick and I were to be married, but I’d given her no details, and I certainly hadn’t asked for help with the food. In my wildest nightmares, I never dreamed she’d feel she had to be at the wedding. After all, she was settled in France and had her small café to run. Wrong! In her spidery handwriting, she said she knew I would need help with the food, and she knew she must arrive a few days before the wedding. Gabrielle would manage the café.
Gabrielle? Her totally spoiled, rude, and unlikable daughter manage a café? That would be a disaster. Too late to tell Irene to turn around and go home.
And help with the food? It was all in order, all arranged. Irene would upset all the careful planning I’d done so that I could have everything just as I wanted and yet not go beyond the budget Patrick and I had established. The cake was ordered, the dinner menu set: butler-passed appetizers of deviled eggs, a specialty of my mom, stuffed mushrooms that Patrick loved, and gougères, the latter a tip of the hat to Irene’s tutelage. I still remembered how my arm ached the first day she made me beat the dough—and beat it and beat it. For the seated dinner, I’d chosen a pear and Brie salad and lobster thermidor in puff pastry with haricot vert bundles. On my TV show, Recipes from My Mom’s Kitchen, I cooked basic American foods; for my wedding, I wanted to go upscale and haute cuisine. Patrick said anything but eggplant.
Patrick and I had agreed on only one cake, and I chose the groom’s cake. I’d never yet been to a wedding where I liked the traditional bridal cake. Tasteless and pale compared to the groom’s cake. We would have chocolate cake interlaced with layers of mousse. My mom protested, and I thought Irene would likely agree with her.
But I was convinced that the cookbook, not the wedding, was behind this sudden trip back to Chicago. Dropping onto one of the kitchen table chairs, I took a sip of my now-cold coffee and forced myself to read the letter yet again, holding the crinkly blue paper so tightly it was a wonder I didn’t tear it. No, it wasn’t a bad dream. There it was in Irene’s handwriting: “Meet me at 11:45 p.m. Air France #245.” No please, no thank you, just an order. So typical. Irene would think nothing of asking us to drive clear across the city late at night, at least a twenty-five-mile drive taking well over an hour on those
crowded freeways that I dreaded. Thank heaven Patrick was in my life and would drive me. I smiled at the thought. If Patrick weren’t in my life and marrying me in a week, Irene would not be coming from France. Maybe.
Where was he anyway? How long did it take to shower? I’d fixed breakfast and then he’d gone back to his own apartment. He didn’t have classes this morning, and he said he’d be right back. I was bursting to tell him our wedding would be ruined.
A few minutes later, Patrick found me still seated at the kitchen table, staring into space. “Henny, what’s wrong? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I stood up and put my arms around him, feeling his comfort. “A real live ghost, and she’ll be here tonight. We’re to pick Irene up at O’Hare at eleven forty-five.” I waited for his groan of impatience.
Silly me. Patrick slid out of my embrace, and said, “She’s coming all the way from France for our wedding? That’s wonderful of her. After all, she’s sort of family. Wonder if she’ll bring Gabrielle?”
I shuddered at the thought. “Gabrielle is staying behind, supposedly to manage the café, though I doubt she has a clue about that. The thing is, Irene will want to cater the wedding.” I seriously thought my tone of voice conveyed the complications that lay ahead. Again, silly me.
“Terrific! That will save us some money, won’t it?”
Patrick was so far from understanding Irene, let alone the culinary world. “Patrick,” I said, stepping farther away from him, “we can’t just tell the Palmer House caterer that we’re sorry, but we don’t need him. We’ve booked the room and his time. That means if anyone else wanted the space or his services, he couldn’t do it. Besides,
Irene will not have a kitchen, let alone equipment. No, the idea is ridiculous, but I’ll have to be the one to tell her.”
“And that will be hard for you,” he said, coming closer and wrapping me in his arms. Patrick always knew how to comfort me.
“There is something more,” I said. “She’s bringing her cookbook and wants me to arrange a signing. What cookbook? As far as I know, it’s still an outline on my computer and hers.”
“Maybe she wants to surprise you,” he suggested.
“She already did,” I muttered. Patrick sometimes didn’t see the world the way I did. I tried to make myself pick up his positive attitude, but damn! It was hard.
* * *
That night, we drove across the city in silence. Part of me marveled at the city at night, bright with thousands of lights in windows, streetlights, headlights of cars. Even the occasional traffic lights added to the whirl of color. I wondered what people were doing behind those lit windows—was it a cleaning crew? Someone working late, sleeves rolled up, a McDonald’s bag next to the desk. Lovers watching television, their arms entwined. Did they realize I was getting married in a week?
What was I, a girl from suburban Texas, doing slicing through the Chicago night with a man I’d never met a little over a year ago? Sure, I hoped for fame, fortune, and romance when I answered that ad for a chef’s assistant for a TV show. But not only did I not expect Irene, I had no idea that Patrick, murder, and mayhem lay in my future. And now marriage. I turned to look at Patrick, in part to reassure myself that he was real.
When I reached a light hand out to his arm, he flashed me a smile. He was real, all right, and wonderful.
But what I hoped was the start of a flourishing career in the world of television culinary programming didn’t turn out to be what I expected. I thought Irene had studied at Le Cordon Bleu in France and was my entrée to the high-powered world of food television. I knew now that Irene Foxglove did not attend Le Cordon Bleu but the one-year program at Kendall College here in Chicago. The station was local, the show’s ratings if not in the basement still on the ground floor. Irene’s French airs were based on time spent there in her youth as an au pair. All that shared history did not make me any happier about her arrival. I wondered where she’d stay, worrying that she meant to stay in my apartment.
Patrick brought me back to the present moment. “Henny, can’t you find a way to involve Irene, so she can save face? And what will we do about that signing?”
“57th Street Books has cookbooks, but I don’t know how receptive they’d be. In fact, I have my doubts. And I haven’t seen the cookbook yet, don’t know if she used my ideas. If it yells ‘self-published, vanity press’ at you the minute you pick it up, I won’t promote it.”
“Hey, change that attitude. Go in there all confident and rave about this French chef. And quit judging the book till you see it.”
“And when can I study the book and talk to the chef? I have a taping tomorrow morning, and I suppose I’ll have to spend the afternoon with Irene. And I’m not taking her into a bookstore with me. She’d ruin any deal I could make by saying the wrong thing. She has no filter.”
“As in diva?” he asked, grinning.
“Yeah. Exactly.”
My mind skipped from bookstores to wedding, and I worried again about mixing Irene and the intimate event I had planned. Would she take over? Ours was to be a small wedding. I wanted small but classy. Eight people—Irene would make nine. At least she didn’t come in as the unlucky thirteenth. Another way to ruin it, but I wouldn’t voice that to Patrick. I was a bit superstitious. We had reserved a hospitality suite at the famed Palmer House Hotel, though the minister would perform the actual ceremony in the grand lobby with its incredibly high frescoed ceilings, its gilt figures standing guard, the wall sconces that provided dim light and most likely were by Tiffany. I admit I was a schoolgirl in love with a dream. That lobby was the grandest place I could imagine.
Through Irene’s misadventures, I’d gotten acquainted with Betty Peterman, assistant to the general manager of the hotel. I presented my idea to her, and she immediately went to the general manager, a man named Jim Holcomb. He was intrigued by a wedding in the lobby of the hotel—they hosted weddings all the time but never in the grand lobby. Holcomb thought no one would be inconvenienced or disapproving if we were a small group. And it would be on a Sunday night, not a busy time for the hotel.
“Ray Peterman, our historian, talks to small groups in the lobby all the time. No difference.”
I loved Mr. Peterman. He was a true gentleman, probably seventy or better, always dressed in a suit with a white shirt and a bright bow tie. He reigned over a small museum on the hotel’s mezzanine, and when he held a treasure in his hands, his eyes
glowed with excitement. He had shown me ashtrays and coffee cups, celebrity photographs, autographed, of course, and menus of days gone by. He let me hold a rare silver tea kettle and smiled when I admired a wine goblet. Mr. Peterman had an incredible storehouse of knowledge in his brain, and I’d picked it for the wedding colors—a soft, light brown accented by gold and a touch of scarlet. He also helped me order wedding gifts for the attendees—crystal goblets with our names and the date on one side and an etching of the Palmer House on the other.
Back to the present: “You’ll like the gougères—little cheesy bites of airy, puffy pastry. Irene could do those. They’re time-consuming.”
“Just no eggplant, please,” he pleaded. Patrick was no stranger in the kitchen. He was a good cook, but he stuck to things like chili and spaghetti sauce. Some of my choices, like pâté, were beyond him.
“Well, Irene should be pleased I chose lobster thermidor in puff pastry for the entrée. It was cheaper than tenderloin or a carving stand, both of which Claude suggested. And I think she has a recipe for lobster thermidor in the cookbook.” I was beginning to see connections. “Irene will not love Claude. He’s not French, and he won’t fuss all over her. But he’ll be polite and call her Madame. I get along with him great.” I sat back with a satisfied smile, suddenly seeing at least one thing that might work out. “I’ll introduce them right after tomorrow’s taping. Claude can distract Irene.” I had no idea then just how irrelevant any distractions from me might prove.
“Terrific! I’m glad you’re feeling better about Irene’s visit. I want to be sure she feels welcome and included.”
Patrick was too nice. He didn’t feel that nagging doubt that I did. I was still worried about what kind of trouble Irene would get into.
