Eclairs: Filled with Lies

by Blake Rivers

Heritage dairy cream keeps curdling. Cattle are mysteriously falling ill. And agricultural consultants are asking too many questions.

Pastry chef Marcus Chen came to South Carolina to fix éclair problems at a charming dairy festival. Instead, he's uncovered a criminal conspiracy targeting traditional farmers for their irreplaceable genetic resources and century-old family recipes.

Someone is systematically poisoning heritage livestock while stealing traditional knowledge worth millions on the black market. When cheese makers' family recipes disappear and breeding records are targeted for theft, Marcus realizes an entire agricultural community is under attack.

But criminals who specialize in stealing agricultural heritage have underestimated the determination of traditional farmers—and a pastry chef with expertise in food science and a growing talent for agricultural crime investigation.

Can food chemistry expertise solve agricultural terrorism? And will heritage dairy farms survive coordinated attacks by international criminal networks?

Marcus is about to discover that protecting traditional farming requires more than understanding the science of heritage ingredients—it requires understanding the criminal psychology of those who view cultural heritage as commercial opportunity.

Some recipes are worth killing for. Some traditions are worth dying to protect.

📚 MORE CULINARY CHRONICLES 📚
🍎 ROTTEN TO THE CORE (Book 1)
🍞 RISING TO THE OCCASION (Book 2)
🍪 CRUMBLING UNDER PRESSURE (Book 3)
⭐ START THE SERIES ANYWHERE! ⭐ Each Culinary Chronicles mystery is a complete standalone adventure. Jump in with any book and fall in love with Marcus Chen's world of food, friends, and fascinating mysteries.

"Finally, a cozy mystery series that teaches you real cooking techniques while keeping you guessing!" - Food & Mystery Blog

Perfect for readers who love their mysteries served with a generous helping of heart, humor, and heritage recipes that have been perfecting themselves for generations.

303 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 10, 2025

About the author

Hi, I'm Blake and as you may have guessed by now, I'm a writer. Yup, that’s right, I write books and I wrote my first novel, The Assassin Princess, in 2011 when I was twenty-eight. Two sequels followed, A Step into Darkscape and The Assassin's Codaci. This magical fantasy series started as a story written about my girlfriend, at the time, an artist who dreamed of being a fierce warrior in another world, who kicked butt and swung a sword to battle the enemy. It grew and became The Assassin Princess, a tale of an artist who is kidnapped and taken to a strange land full of magic, talking unicorns and dragons. It goes dark, exploring jealously, greed and hunger; it goes light and reaches for the best in even the most flawed of characters. But in essence, it still remains about her at its heart.

I started writing when I was seven years old. Back then it was mostly poems about whatever interested me at the time, be it the seasons or the planets, or my love for libraries and books. I also turned my hand to a few short stories, all hand written and lost over time.

I don’t remember why I started writing, but I do remember what inspired me to do it. It was Yuri, writing his poems to Lara in the frozen house in the film Dr Zhivago, and the beautiful music played, Lara’s Theme; it was the sound of the typewriter at the very start of the film Misery, where Paul Sheldon finishes his latest book.

These still inspire me to this day, along with whole host of other influences: the novels by Brandon Sanderson, Sarah J. Maas, J. R. R. Tolkien, J. K. Rowling, Anne Rice, Stephen King, Patricia Cornwell to name a few. Any movie that shows a typewriter.