Hail to the Chef
A White House Chef Mystery #2

by Julie Hyzy

Ollie Paras is a chef.  She’s no ordinary chef though, she is the executive chef at the White House and sometimes her job can be chaotic. The Thanksgiving holidays are right around the corner and she’s busy making preparations for the annual feast, having a brief talk with the First Lady, when her day is interrupted by a bomb scare.  The White House is crawling with secret service agents and so Ollie is swept away with the First lady and her nephew Sean Baxter to a reinforced shelter in the basement of the White House. They wait while the entire building is swept for explosives and eventually are allowed to leave when the bomb is determined to be a fake.

Behind schedule now, Ollie struggles to catch up while the rest of the White House staff scurry to get the place ready for the hordes of expected holiday visitors.  And then another emergency occurs.  An electrician, a good friend of Ollie’s working on restoring power to one of the rooms, is accidentally electrocuted and Ollie is first on the scene.  Something about the accident bothers Ollie and she’d like some answers. It’s been just too much for one day.

When she arrives for work the following day Sean Baxter, the First Lady’s nephew, stops by the kitchen for small talk and to offer a hand getting things ready.  Things start to roll again but, because of the bomb scare, Ollie is ordered to attend class with Special Agent Leonard "Gav" Gavin on sabotage recognition so that the entire White House staff can keep their eyes open for possible future bombing attempts.  Ollie proves quite perceptive at the task.

The next day there is news that Sean Baxter has committed suicide. It shocks the First Lady and doesn’t make any sense to anyone close to Sean.  He had been counseling his aunt in a business matter where she was being pressured by her partners to sell out.  Sean had recommended that she hold on to her shares.

The bomb threat continues when Ollie turns up another explosive device hidden in a storage room.  Special Agent Gavin investigates and suspects that there will be more.  He enlists Ollie to be his eyes and ears on the staff.  With the official opening of the Christmas season right around the corner, it is imperative that the White House be kept absolutely secure.  Given the security that surrounds the Capitol, a bomb can only be an inside job.

One would think that the chef’s job would be quite predictable and terminally boring but Julie Hyzy has managed to breathe a lot of life into her characters.  I found this book very easy to read because the story flowed so well and took you to new and surprising places along the way.  It never bogs down.  This will not be the last Julie Hyzy book that I read.

And as a bonus, there is a big bunch of really tasty appetizer recipes in the back of the book.

I have to praise author Julie Hyzy for one thing immediately.  She has managed to write an intimate book about the White House that is totally non-political.  You can read and enjoy this book no matter what party you belong to because the President and his wife are not identified and their political leanings are never even mentioned; quite a feat in an era when many authors allow their political philosophies to bleed into their writing.

Reviews of other titles in this series

State of the Onion #1
Hail to the Chef #2
Affairs of Steak #5
Fonduing Fathers #6