A CATERED THANKSGIVING

A Thanksgiving meal blows up in a diner’s face, leaving the catering team on the hook for murder.

Monty Field is too cheap to heat his dismal house, much less pay for a catered holiday dinner. So his equally repellent clan gets together and hires Bernie and Libby Simmons (A Catered Birthday Party, 2009, etc.) of A Little Taste of Heaven to prepare their Thanksgiving feast. Their business name turns out to be prophetic, since one tap on the turkey sends Monty to his eternal reward, leaving his trophy wife Lexus, his brothers Ralph and Perceval, his insecure children Geoff and Melissa, his pampered niece Greta and his nephews Bob and Audie to squabble endlessly over what he may have left whom in his will. A snowstorm strands the luckless Simmons sisters overnight in the Field homestead, where they overhear the family hatching plots to pin the murder on them, witness the reappearance of Monty’s body on Lexus’s bed, listen to various family members’ complaints that other family members are trying to kill them and of course get locked in a bunker filled with fireworks. But they can’t see a shadowy figure called “El Huron” (described in such cleverly gender-concealing language as “El Huron slid a gloved hand under the wool mask and scratched El Huron’s cheek”), who may hold the key to Monty’s gruesome death. Includes four recipes, three for Thanksgiving and one for Passover.

The inane dialogue and preposterous plotting are unlikely to tempt even the most devoted fan of cook-me cozies.