Instead of trying to find your perfect match in a dating app, we bring you the “Author-Reader Match” where we introduce you to authors you may fall in love with. It’s our great pleasure to present Ellen Byron!   Writes: I write humorous cozy mysteries set in great locations like Cajun Country, New York, and New Orleans. They’re a vacation with murder, wink wink. I love creating fun, quirky characters and plots that keep you guessing. My books also contain around five recipes each, so they’re almost like a combination mystery and cookbook. My Vintage Cookbook Mysteries include special recipes from my own collection of over 100 vintage cookbooks.   WINED AND DIED IN NEW ORLEANS combines my love of New Orleans, especially the majestic historic homes of the Garden District, with my love of wine – lol! – and my personal experience of struggling with whether to evacuate or stick it out when a hurricane approaches.   In this second Vintage Cookbook Mystery, the staff of Bon Vee Culinary House Museum is under threat of an impending hurricane when they find a stash of priceless, centuries-old wine under the mansion. When my protagonist Ricki, who runs Miss Vee’s Vintage…

1–What is the title of your latest release? BAYOU BOOK THIEF: A Vintage Cookbook Mystery 2–What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book? Young widow Ricki James-Diaz starts a new life in New Orleans, where she opens a shop selling vintage cookbooks and kitchenware in a Garden District mansion-turned-house museum and is thrust into sleuthing when a sticky-fingered coworker is found murdered with a vintage kitchen item from Ricki’s own shop. 3–How did you decide where your book was going to take place? I’ve been madly in love with New Orleans ever since I transferred to Tulane University in the middle of my sophomore year. I love all south Louisiana. That’s why I set my Cajun Country Mystery series in… three guesses where. I even transferred my NOLA love to our daughter. She just graduated from Loyola University, Tulane’s next-door neighbor. 4–Would you hang out with your heroine in real life? Absolutely. We share a love of New Orleans and of vintage cookbooks. In fact, her passion for them was inspired by my own. I have at least a hundred, some dating back to the 1800s. Plus, I now live in Los Angeles, and she grew up here, so we…

Murder in the Bayou Boneyard, the sixth book in my Agatha Award-winning Cajun Country Mystery series, revolves around Halloween in the fictional village of Pelican, Louisiana. All the books in this series (as well as in my Catering Hall Mysteries, which I write under the pen name, Maria DiRico) include recipes. I wanted this particular book to contain a couple of recipes that were Halloween themed but also had a distinctly Louisiana touch. After a long search and much experimentation, I came up with a recipe for Cajun Pecan Cookie “Fingers.” These cookies are similar in texture to pecan sandies.  They’re tasty and not super sweet. I tinkered with this recipe to prepare it for Fresh Fiction and it’s slightly different from the one in the book. I added two more tablespoons of powdered sugar, but another change was the result of a happy accident. I read the measurement for vanilla as four tablespoons instead of teaspoons. Oops! But you know what? It made the recipe even better. If you want to add a real Cajun kick to these cookies, mix a 1/4 to a 1/2 teaspoon of cayenne pepper into the dry ingredients. That’s the secret ingredient in my…