Alameda Mystery Writer Hits the Chocolate Trail

From a press release:

Oaxaca Chocolate, the new Mexican mystery by Alameda author Charles Kerns, follows retired expat Robert Evans as he investigates an explosion in the Zocalo, tracks money flowing down from the States, and finds some pretty good breakfast hangouts.

He travels to El Norte to investigate a chocolate startup and discovers "…a funny city across the bay called Alameda, a good Spanish name, but an all-American town.

"I found no Zócalo there, only a main street with mostly two-story shopfronts. Mostly local. Maybe all local. A couple of bars. Restaurants aplenty. Hundred-year trees on side streets. A greasy spoon or two. A restoration of my teenage Main Street. A time warp.

"I walked by an ice cream shop, an anachronism on any other street, with handmade signs and that smell, the one that surged up in a mixture of remembered teenage dread and adventure wrapped in ice cream, fudge, and candies. Kids in white paper hats holding scoops were loading cones. As I did as a teen."

Oaxaca Chocolate is a travelogue, a cross-border mystery, a taste of the comida, chocolate, and mezcal in Mexico’s colonial city located high in its scenic, southern mountains. This is the perfect book to discover Oaxaca’s cityscapes, to meet its gracious people, and to explore warm-sun living, all with a little crime on the side. 

"…houses here were not white picket fence ones–no green front lawns anywhere. Oaxacan houses descended from castles that Romans and, later, Spanish and their Mexican offspring built with rooms branching inward from the tall thick walls fortifying the property line. A house was built to keep people out.

"Inside the walls everything changed. Courtyards opened the center of the building. They breathed in air, grew vines and flowers, and bubbled with old fountains. Courtyards were the gems that made home sweet. They descended from Arab gardens that ruled Spanish leisure for five hundred years and came to Mexico in the dreams of the conquistadors, long after Christians had pushed out, killed or converted everyone in Spain who could not say their rosaries and cross themselves twenty times a day."

“My novel takes you to Oaxaca — I want to give the reader more than a plot," Kerns says.

'I want to give them the city that I love — with its ancient ruins, Spanish architecture, loving peoples and, of course, great foods. But not forgetting its corruption and often trampled hopes."

Robert Adler, coauthor of Viva Oaxaca explains, "There's no place like Oaxaca, and no one better at capturing it in all its complexity than Charles Kerns. Through the knowing eyes of his reluctant hero, Kerns guides you unerringly through Oaxaca's winding streets and tangled intrigues."

Oaxaca Chocolate is the second mystery in the Santo Gordo series. Both are available at Amazon.com.

Kerns is currently working on Puebla Mole, to be published next summer.
For more information visit http://www.facebook.com/SantoGordo and http://goo.gl/P9Ng7F 

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