Saturday, March 10, 2018

Coffee with a canine: Leslie Karst & Ziggy

Featured at Coffee with a Canine: Leslie Karst & Ziggy.

The author, on how Ziggy got her name:
Ziggy’s full name is Sieglinde (but we spell it with a Z so folks will pronounce it correctly). She’s named after the heroine in Wagner’s opera, Die Walküre, and has the majesty and spunk to match her namesake—the demi-goddess who fell in love with her brother and bore Siegfried, who himself went on to marry his aunt, Brünhilde. (And you think your family is dysfunctional.) We mostly call her Zig, Ziggy, or Sieglinde, but on occasion refer to her as...[read on]
About Karst's latest novel, Death al Fresco, from the publisher:
It’s early autumn in Santa Cruz and restaurateur Sally Solari, inspired by the eye-popping canvases of Paul Gauguin, the artist for whom her restaurant is named, decides to enroll in a plein air painting class. But the beauty of the Monterey Bay coastline is shattered during one of their outings when Sally’s dog, Buster, sniffs out a corpse entangled in a pile of kelp.

The body is identified as Gino, a local fisherman and a regular at Sally’s father’s restaurant, Solari's, until he disappeared after dining there a few nights before. Witnesses claim he left reeling drunk, but his waitress swears the old man had only two beers with his meal. And then the fingers begin to point at Sally’s dad for negligently allowing an inebriated customer to walk home alone at night.

From a long menu of suspects, including a cast of colorful characters who frequent the historic Santa Cruz fisherman’s wharf, Sally must serve up the tall order of clearing her father’s name in Death al Fresco, Leslie Karst’s third culinary mystery.
Visit Leslie Karst’s author website.

Coffee with a Canine: Leslie Karst & Ziggy.

--Marshal Zeringue