First in a new series! At the San Francisco Seafood Festival, someone is steamed enough to kill a cook.... When restaurant reviewer Darcy Burnett gets served a pink slip from the San Francisco Chronicle , she needs to come up with an alternative recipe for success quickly. Her feisty aunt Abby owns a tricked-out school bus, which she’s converted into a hip and happening food truck, and Darcy comes aboard as a part-timer while she develops a cookbook project based on recipes from food fests in the Bay Area. But she soon finds someone’s been trafficking in character assassination—literally—when a local chef turns up dead and her aunt is framed for the murder. The restaurant chef was an outspoken enemy of food trucks, and now Darcy wonders if one of the other vendors did him in. With her aunt’s business—and freedom—on the line, it’s up to Darcy to steer the murder investigation in the right direction and put the brakes on an out-of-control killer…. RECIPES INCLUDED! Praise for Penny Pike writing as Penny Warner and her Party-Planning Mystery Series:  “A party you don’t want to miss.”— New York Times Bestselling Author Denise Swanson “The books dish up a banquet of mayhem.”— The Oakland Tribune “Delightful!”— Meritorious Mysteries   Penny Pike also writes the Party-Planning mystery series under the name Penny Warner. She has published more than sixty books and is a winner of the Macavity and Agatha awards. PRAISE FOR THE PARTY-PLANNING MYSTERY SERIES BY PENNY PIKE (Writing as Penny Warner) ALSO BY PENNY PIKE (Writing as Penny Warner)   Acknowledgments Chapter 1 Life sucked. Forget counting calories. I needed this cream puff. It would have been the perfect spring day in San Francisco—no fog, sunshine, with a light, salty breeze coming off the bay—if it weren’t for the news I’d just received from my editor at the San Francisco Chronicle . “Darcy, I’m afraid we have to let you go,” Patrick Craig had told me moments after I’d arrived at my soon-to-be-former desk. “As you know, times are tough in the newspaper business.” As a parting gift, he’d promised to give me some freelance assignments from time to time, the first being a review of the San Francisco Crab and Seafood Festival, which was being held for the next two days at Fort Mason. My assignment: write up a critique of the festival and an article about the Oyster Shuck-and-Suck Contest. I hated oysters. The slimy things made me gag. But as a now-unemployed restaurant critic, what choice did I have? If I didn’t take this gig, I’d soon be living on Top Ramen. I sat on a bench near the daily food truck gathering at Fort Mason, trying to figure out tomorrow’s story angle as I watched the prelunch crowd gather. Hungry gourmands were queuing up at the dozen colorful food trucks that were parked each day in the prime spots. The names were almost as entertaining as the decorated trucks themselves. Road Grill, a bright red truck with giant grill marks painted across the front, served “exotic meats” and was by far the biggest crowd-pleaser with the longest line. The Yankee Doodle Noodle Truck, yellow, with images of noodles the size of octopus tentacles, had its fair share of fans, as did Kama Sushi, blue and covered with tropical fish, and the Coffee Witch, featuring a sexy cartoon witch stirring a cauldron of steaming brew. No food truck stop was complete without a bacon truck—this one called itself Porky’s. But my favorite was a truck called Dream Puff, featuring a giant chocolate-laden cream puff painted on a vanilla background. The cream puffs, everything from strawberry mocha to pralines and cream to lemon meringue, were to die for—not to mention the “Dream Puff Guy” who served them. But it was the Big Yellow School Bus, a former school bus converted into a food truck, that got most of my business on my lunch breaks. I was a frequent diner there, mainly because it was owned and operated by my eccentric aunt Abby, and she gave me free food. Currently soothing the news of my job loss with a Caramel Espresso Dream Puff, I was interrupted by the sound of shouting coming from the middle of the circular food truck court. I recognized the fortysomething, balding man as Oliver Jameson, the owner and chef at Bones ’n’ Brew, a brick-and-mortar restaurant across from Fort Mason. The seasoned place had once been a popular dining spot in the city, but business had fallen off over the past couple of years, and the quality had gone downhill too. I’d written a review last year about how the restaurant hadn’t changed much since Jameson’s father, Nigel, ran the place thirty years ago. In his many letters to the newspaper’s editor, Oliver Jameson had blamed the “inundation of rat-infested roach coaches that had set up shop across the street from my distinguished dining establishment” for his business losses. But as a restaurant critic—or former restaurant critic—I had a hunch it was because Jameson hadn’t updated his menu or decor in decades. “Get outta here, y