Asking for Truffle (Book 1)
When Charity Penn
receives a letter saying she won a trip to Camellia Beach, South Carolina
complete with free cooking lessons at the town's seaside chocolate shop, the
Chocolate Box, she's immediately skeptical. She never entered the contest. Her
former prep school friend offers to look into the phony prize―only to end up
drowned in a vat of chocolate.
Struck with guilt, Penn heads to the southern beach town to investigate why he
was killed. But as wary as she is of the locals, she finds herself lured into
their eccentric vibe, letting her defenses melt away and even learning the art
of crafting delicious chocolates. That is, until delight turns bittersweet as
she steps straight into the midst of a deadly plot to destroy the seaside town.
Now, only Penn's quick thinking and a mysterious cask of rare chocolate can
save the town she's learning to love.
Playing with Bonbon Fire (Book 2)
Chocolate shop owner,
Charity Penn is at it again-cooking up chocolate treats while trying to keep
everyone in the quirky seaside town of Camellia Beach safe.
A threatening note, a dead musician, and decades of secrets put the town's
first beach music festival and its band members in grave danger.
With help from her meddling half-sister and a new flavor of chocolate sweets to
ignite the senses, Penn follows the shifting tide of evidence to uncover a
forty-year-old secret.
I’ve read Dorothy St. James’s work for many years. Her
first cozy mysteries, the White House Gardener series, comprised three books.
Her new cozy series, A Southern Chocolate Shop Mysteries, debuted in September,
2017. I read Asking for Truffle, the first in the series, but I waited until the
second book, Playing with Bonbon Fire
came out before asking author Dorothy St. James for an interview. Why?
I was overrun with fall/holiday
releases. Publishers stack a heavy fall lineup. With the second in the series
released in late March, I finally was able to fit her into our schedule. Although
the books can stand alone, you will enjoy the series more reading them in
order.
Main character, Charity Penn,
has an interesting and most unfortunate backstory. She chooses to go by the
name Penn rather than Charity because her cold paternal grandmother named
her—and that’s all Penn was to her grandmother—a charity project. She doesn’t
know who her mother is. She only knows she was dumped at her father’s family
mansion by her mother, who then disappeared. By necessity, Penn has a hard
shell. But she’s been burned in more ways than one. As a character, Penn solves
mysteries, but she, in and of herself, is a mystery—one she is also tracking
down and trying to solve.
Please
welcome Dorothy St. James to WWK.
E. B. Davis
Thank you for having me here. It’s always fun to talk with
others about the stories that are so alive in my head.
How did the new series come
about, Dorothy?
I love chocolate. Need I say more? Well, there is a bit
more. I’d been playing with the idea of a chocolate shop mystery series ever
since I’d started writing the White House Gardener mystery series. After my
daughter was born, I knew I couldn’t write a series where I’d have to be
traveling so much for research. So I went back to my chocolate shop series and
set it in my back yard.
Your series is set in Camellia
Beach, SC, as you describe, near to Charleston. Is Camellia Beach a
fictionalized Sullivan’s Island?
Actually, Camellia Beach is a fictionalized Folly Beach. Like
Sullivan’s Island, Folly Beach is also one of the islands a few minutes from
the historic City of Charleston. Unlike Sullivan’s, Folly is a
more...um...unconventional. Instead of attracting the rich and powerful, Folly
has historically attracted the artists and surfers and those who are looking
for a freer way of living. In the past, some natives called it the “poor man’s
beach.” I lived on Folly Beach for twenty years and fell in love with its raw
beauty and its quirky residents. I always wanted to capture its specialness in
the pages of a book.
Who is Granny Mae (who really
isn’t Penn’s grandmother)?
Granny Mae is Penn’s rock. As you’ve pointed out, she’s not
Penn’s grandmother. While Penn was growing up under her grandmother’s
disapproving cold glare, Granny Mae worked as Grandmother Cristobel’s personal
assistant. Granny Mae made sure that Penn was being taken care of. She stepped
in and served as Penn’s mother. She loves Penn and is one of the few people in
the world Penn trusts completely.
What brought Penn to Camellia
Beach from Madison, Wisconsin?
Penn received a strange letter telling her that she won a
trip to visit Camellia Beach. Now Penn, who has been tricked in the past by
people who want to get close to her powerful and rich family, doesn’t enter
contests. She suspects this is another trick by someone wanting to use her. A
friend of hers volunteers to check things out for her. When he is found dead in
a vat of chocolate in Camellia Beach, she knows she needs to go and see for
herself what happened to him and why.
An old and bad boyfriend gave
Penn a Papillon puppy, Stella. Stella bites. Why does Penn keep the dog?
Ah, Stella. She’s feisty. I love her to bits. Penn refuses
to give up on her little dog. And in her own way, she loves her just as much as
I love that barky Papillon. Penn knows what it feels like to be turned out of a
home and discarded. Her own family has made it clear from the get-go that she’s
an embarrassment and unwanted. She doesn’t have it in her heart to do that to
Stella, even if the little dog likes to bite her.
The chocolate shop features some
very different truffles, like, cheddar cheese and pretzel truffles and cayenne
pepper truffles. Do most chocolate shops feature savory truffles or other
unique products?
Spicy pepper truffles
are much more common than they used to be. Historically cocoa isn’t something
that is made into a sweet dish. The Aztecs and many of the South American
natives today see the cacao bean and chocolate as an enhancement for savory
recipes. When used in cooking it often adds a welcome earthiness. I’ve
enjoyed playing with this aspect of chocolate that many in the modern world
have forgotten. Plus, chocolate and cheese pair up wonderfully. So of course I
had to try and develop a bonbon that included both.
What’s a melanger, and what is
conching?
These strange things are terms used in the chocolate-making
process. A melanger is a machine with two stone rollers that grind the cacao
bean, mixing it with the sugar, cocoa butter, and any flavoring that you might
want to add to it. The mixing is called conching. The original mixers resembled
conch shells, and that’s where the name comes from. During the conching process
the sharp taste of the fresh cocoa slowly disappears and the delicious
chocolate flavor becomes fully developed. The process can take anywhere from 12
hours to 3 days.
Are Amar Cacao beans real?
I wish they were real! I dearly want to eat them. No, the
Amar bean is a fabrication of my sweet-tooth. But the bean does have some basis
reality. There are rare and wonderful (and sometimes endangered) varieties of
cacao beans growing in the South American rain forest. During my research, I
learned that some of the rarest beans are the hardest to grow and are often the
most flavorful. I played with that idea and created the rarest and best tasting
bean for my special chocolate shop by the sea.
Why does Penn have an aversion
to physical contact, like getting a hug?
Penn’s family is a real piece of work. They treated her like
an unwanted waif because her mother had abandoned her on her father’s doorstep
as an infant. The powerful Penn family wasn’t ready to accept a bastard into
their ranks. They still aren’t. So as you might imagine, hugs were rare. When
she started school, she quickly learned that kindness and physical contact were
often traps. Many of her “friends” were only interested in her family’s money
and position in society. They didn’t actually care about her.
Although Penn seems to like
Camellia Beach and the chocolate shop, she doesn’t adjust very well to the
environment and work. Why does she still wear business suits to make chocolate
and wait on customers?
Penn was raised by a well-to-do family where appearance,
especially business appearance, was important. As a result, she has a difficult
time adjusting to a more laid-back lifestyle. She thinks she needs to wear her
business attire because, after all, she’s running a business.
Out of her father’s family, the
only relation who makes a relationship with Penn is her half-sister Tina. How
did this occur?
Tina is a decent human being. While Tina is the oldest
legitimate child, Penn is her father’s oldest child. Every time their
grandmother told Tina how much better she was, how she was more loveable,
prettier, smarter than Penn, it pushed Tina to want to be closer to Penn. Tina
could see the difference in how she and Penn were being treated, and it
troubled her. Not only that, she loves her big sister and wants to spend time
with her.
Penn isn’t very successful in
following chocolate-making instructions. But she seems to be able to create
candies intuitively. Why?
Penn loves chocolate. She thinks about chocolate all of the
time. (I do too.) She pictures how different flavors will work together.
Because of her obsession with chocolate, that part of the chocolate-making
process comes quite naturally. Making a pretty bonbon or a fancy truffle,
however, isn’t a skill she’s mastered...yet. Luckily, she has her partner
Bertie to help out with the technical aspects of bringing together Penn’s
flavor combinations.
In the first book, Penn finds
her maternal grandmother, Mabel Maybank, only to lose her when she dies. How
does Penn know Mabel is her grandmother?
Penn learns from the results of a DNA test at the end of the
first book, Asking For Truffle, that
she is indeed Mabel Maybank’s grandmother. Her friend, who was killed while
investigating the chocolate shop and the town, had the DNA test results. But
how did he get DNA samples for Penn and Mabel? These are questions Penn isn’t
ready to ask until later in the series...
Mabel wills the chocolate shop
to Penn. How do Mabel’s children feel about that?
Mabel’s children are furious. They had hoped to sell the
land the shop is sitting on to a developer for a large profit. Penn, on the
other hand, has no intention of selling the shop. She wants to keep it open as
a way to honor her grandmother’s life work.
Although Penn is a trust-fund
baby, she has no access to her money. Why?
Because of how Penn arrived into her paternal family’s
life—as an infant left on their doorstep by a woman her father barely remembers
ever meeting—she’s raised as an outsider. While pride dictates that Penn is set
up with her fair share of the family fortune, her father and grandmother don’t
believe she can be trusted with the money. She is, after all, the daughter of a
woman who couldn’t even be bothered to raise her own child. They set up Penn’s
trust-fund in a way that she has to ask a team of lawyers who answer to her
stern grandmother for any disbursements of money. Determined to make it on her
own, she rarely asks for money. And when she does ask, the answer is usually a
resounding “no.”
Penn may have lost her maternal grandmother, but she’s
inherited Mabel’s friends. Bertie, an older black woman and Mabel’s best-friend
partner, stays to help Penn run the shop. Why does Penn live with Bertie and
not her daughter, Althea, who is now Penn’s bestie?
Penn inherited not only the Chocolate Box, but the building
that houses the shop. This building includes two apartments above the shop.
Mabel, her maternal grandmother, lived in the apartment with her business
partner and best friend, Bertie. After Mabel’s death, Penn moved into Mabel’s
old bedroom. While Althea is Penn’s closest friend, Bertie provides Penn with
stability and friendship that she craves. Plus, the commute to the Chocolate
Box is super easy. All she has to do is walk down the steps to get to her shop.
Why is Althea such an unlikely
best friend for Penn? Will Althea’s differences be good for Penn?
Penn and Althea are quite the opposites. Penn hates magic.
She believes anyone claiming to have magical powers is out to con the other
person out of their money. Althea believes in all things magical, including
witchcraft, ghosts, and the power of crystals. She runs a crystal shop in Camellia
Beach. Penn finds it difficult to trust others. Althea trusts everyone, until
given reason not to. You wouldn’t think they would get along at all. But Althea
believes that fate has brought Penn to Camellia Beach and into her life. Every
time Penn tries to push her away, Althea “blesses her heart” and is always
there when Penn needs her. Althea’s devotion and steadfastness are what finally
win Penn over.
One of Mabel’s daughters
confesses that she is Penn’s mother, but her story doesn’t match her father’s
story of the one-night stand. Penn doesn’t believe the woman. Why doesn’t she
want to believe her?
Florence Corners begrudgingly admits that she’s Penn’s
mother. It’s not at all the touching reunion that Penn had hoped to have with
her long-lost mother. She’d concocted all sorts of stories explaining why her
mother had to leave her and never contact her again. She’d dreamed that one day
her mother would come and tearfully explain that she was a spy, someone stuck
in witness protection, or on the run from some bad character. The only way she
could protect Penn would be to leave her behind.
Florence tells Penn that she didn’t want a child, that she’s
never wanted a child. The coldness of the confession leaves Penn feeling lost.
Of course she doesn’t want to believe this woman. Not only that, her story and
her father’s stories about how they met are so different. Florence has to be
lying. Penn isn’t ready to let go of her fantasy. There has to be a woman out
there who is hurting, who is longing to love her daughter, but because of some
terrible circumstance, she cannot.
What’s next for Penn?
Penn finds herself in the center of yet another mystery in
the third book of the Southern Chocolate Shop Mystery series, In Cold Chocolate (September 2018). Sea
turtles eggs are disappearing from the beach. Penn’s newest creation, chocolate
sea-salt turtles are disappearing from her shop. The death of the local playboy
complicates everything and compels Penn to dig up a mystery many of the residents
on the island would rather keep buried.
If you had your druthers, would
you live at the beach or in the mountains, Dorothy?
The beach, of course! While I love visiting the mountains
and I love splashing around in a clear water lake, the gentle song of the waves
and the tang of the salt in the air are heaven to me.
