Penny Pike Books In Order

Publication Order of Food Festival Mystery Books

Penny Pike is the pen name of the award winning American author named Penny Warner, who has written more than 60 books in her writing career. Most of the novels written by her are based on the mystery genre, whereas the others are based on a mixture of Children’s Books and Nonfiction genres. One of the mystery novels written by Penny has won the Agatha Award in the category of Best Children’s Mystery novel, whereas another has won the Macavity Award in the same category. Author Penny is particularly well known for writing down the successful mystery novel series, Party Planning and The Code Buster Club. She says that she was very much influenced by reading the mystery novels written by author during her childhood. In fact, she was so much impressed that she began writing her own novel when she was only in the 6th grade. Since then, she has gone on to write and publish around sixty fiction and nonfiction novels, as well as adult and children’s books. On being able to become successful and winning a number of national awards, author Penny considers herself lucky. She thinks that it is only because of her sheer hard work and determination that she has become a successful author. Most of her novels have received excellent reviews and have distributed millions of printed copies in over 14 countries of the world. Many of her successful novels have also become bestsellers in a number of literary magazines.

Before taking up writing as a professional and full time career, author Penny obtained her Bachelor’s degree in the subject of Child Development and later earned her Master’s degree in the subject of Special Education. After completing post-graduation studies, Penny Pike began teaching child development in one of the local colleges. Today, more than 20 years have passed since then and she is still teaching the same subject in the same college. Penny often finds some time from her busy writing schedule and gives lectures on child development to the students of her college. Other than that, Penny also likes to give writing tips to the aspiring and upcoming authors while participating in a number of writing conferences all over the world. On account of being one of the prominent and successful writers, Penny has been able to become an active member of a number of writers’ associations like the MWA, SCBWI, Sisters in Crime, the Writers Club of California, and the Women Writing the West. Author Penny has also made a few television appearances, often featuring a few ideas from her successful books. Whenever she is not busy with writing the plots of her future novels or doing the character sketches of her popular characters, Penny likes to indulge herself in reading newspaper columns based on family life. She also likes to keep herself busy with some fun activities in her spare time. As of today, author Penny Pike lives in Danville, California along with her husband named Tom and a couple of grown up children. She is also blessed with 4 beautiful grandchildren. Penny and her husband Tom, often indulge themselves in writing interactive mysteries for a number of libraries all over the country, in order to collect some funds.

One of the successful novel series written by author Penny Pike is the Food Festival Mystery series. It consists of a total of 3 novels published between the years 2014 and 2015. The first novel of the series was published under the title Death of a Crabby Cook’. This novel was released by the NAL publishing house in the year 2014. The plot of the novel is set in San Francisco Bay Area in California, United States and features the primary character in the form of Darcy Burnett. In the opening sequence of the plot of the novel, Darcy is introduced as a restaurant reviewer. The San Francisco Chronicle serves her a pink slip, after which she is required to come up with some alternate recipe in order to gain success quickly. Shortly after, Darcy decides to convert the old bus of her feisty aunt named Abby, into an innovative food truck. She joins the food truck along with her aunt as a part-timer and begins to develop a cookbook project featuring different recipes from the food festivals around the Bay Area. But soon, the dead body of a local restaurant chef is discovered and her aunt is framed for the murder. Later, it is revealed that the chef did not support the idea of food trucks and was totally against it. Now, everything from her reputation up to her aunt’s business, lie on the shoulders of Darcy Burnett, who is required to carry the investigation in the proper direction and catch the real killer before someone else turns up dead.

The second novel of the Food Festival Mystery series written by author Penny was published under the title ‘Death of a Chocolate Cheater’. It was released by the NAL publishing house in the year 2015. The plot of this novel revolves around the murder mystery of a Chocolate vendor in the Chocolate Festival in San Francisco, which Darcy Burnett attempts to solve as soon as possible. In the opening sequence of the plot of the novel, Darcy and her aunt are shown as gearing up for winning the $10,000 prize money in the annual chocolate contest held at the Chocolate Festival in San Francisco. They plan to use the raspberry whoopee pie recipe of aunt Abby for the contest. Darcy faces competition from her former boyfriend Jake Miller, who enters into the contest with his chocolate cream puff recipe. However, the situation becomes tense when one of the judges named Polly Montgomery is found dead at the end of the contest. A number of contestants become the prime suspects in the murder with possible causes of murder. One of them is aunt Abby’s childhood friend. Now, Darcy is once again expected to catch the real murderer before he takes the life of another victim. The novel became successful just like the first novel of the series, which helped author Penny to get motivated to write more interesting novels in this series as well as in other popular series written by her. The success of this series helped author Penny to add more stars to her name as one of the prominent authors of the mystery genre.

One Response to “Penny Pike”

1. Meira Naffy: 2 years ago

   Author Penny is really, really good. I aspire to be as good as her in writing.

   Reply