The Sunday Fish

Kee Sook Lin wanted nothing more than a plate of grilled fish and one ordinary Sunday at the night market. She did not want to watch the man who cooked it die at his own stall.

For thirty years the corner stall has grilled the best fish in the pasar malam (night market) and never once made a soul sick. So, when old Yong Kok Weng collapses at his grill - cooking his dead wife's recipe, in his dead wife's apron, exactly as he has every Sunday for five years - the whole market calls it his heart, or the heat, or bad luck.

Madam Kee, a retired hospital pharmacist who tasted the wrong note in that fish an hour earlier, is the only one who knows it was none of those.

Four hundred people ate from the same grill that night and walked home. To prove that only one of them was ever meant to die, Madam Kee must trace a single crate of day-old fish back through the dark, uncover the secret the old man carried to his grave, and clear a grieving daughter the whole market has already, quietly, convicted.

For thirty years, his fish never made a soul sick. Then came the Sunday it killed the man who grilled it.

Perfect for readers who love:

• Cozy culinary mysteries where the food is a clue, not just decoration
• Medical and pharmaceutical mysteries solved by a professional who knows exactly what a drug can do
• Mysteries set in Southeast and East Asian food cultures - hawker centres, night markets, family kitchens
• A sixty-five-year-old woman sleuth with a lifetime of expertise and no interest in being underestimated
• Malaysian settings, Manglish dialogue, and a hawker community that feels like a real neighbourhood
• Clean, humane whodunits with no gore and no graphic content