Thrilling stories, intriguing trivia and delicious cocktails
Cocktails of Crime is a series of short story collections, each featuring six tales centered around specific cocktails. The stories span various time periods and locations, offering you a taste of different eras and places where crimes unfold. Each story concludes with footnotes and trivia to provide additional context for the references made in the narrative. At the end of each story, you’ll find the namesake of each short story - a cocktail recipe.
Drinks To Die For
This collection of six tales spans more than one and a half centuries, moving from a bustling Singapore and the exotic terrain of British Malaya in the 1850s to a tragic repercussion from the war in Afghanistan in the first decade of the second millennium. In other stories, we’re whisked away to the melting pot of New York in the 1920s, a Poland devastated by World War II, the mysterious seas surrounding Japan and a love story turned deadly set around one of London’s swankiest hotels. Framed by historical fact across different geographical backdrops, these short stories – each dedicated to its own cocktail – provide a rich quilt of intrigue to feed the imagination.
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Lethal Mixtures
The tales here take us from the squalid, fog-shrouded streets of 19th-century London to the grim trenches of France in World War I. Elsewhere, in England we visit a genteel Yorkshire spa town and a picturesque Shropshire estate. We also wander the art- and sun-drenched streets of Florence, Italy, simultaneously becoming embroiled in the Russian Revolution. The final story oscillates between England and Finland as post-war optimism gives way to stark disillusionment. A word of warning though. If you’re looking for a Hollywood ending, these stories have far more in common with the Brothers Grimm than the brothers Disney.
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As Glasses Go Dark
In this, the last book in the Cocktails of Crime trilogy, we again move between disparate backdrops of time and place. Among these, we visit bitter-sweet, rich-versus-poor London in the twilight of the 19th century; the brutality of a feuding China as the reality of nationwide civil war manifests in the mid-1920s, and Valencia’s colourful bullring -- the stage for a Sophocles-style tragic romance -- in the Spain of dictator, Francisco Franco, the early 1970s. In the Introduction to this book we also pay tribute to the men behind the cocktail culture, the inventors and originators of the curiously-named small drinks – the Godfathers of the Craft. For without them, by name at least, this trilogy could not exist.
Available 2026!
