Lou Jane Temple Books In Order

Publication Order of Heaven Lee Books

Publication Order of The Spice Box Books

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Lou Jane Temple is a private chef, chef, food author, and author that is best known for the “Heaven Lee” series of novels. Temple’s road to becoming an author and food writer has been winding and long. She started catering for a rock and roll band and was often found backstage with the stars before she started Café Lulu, a catering company and restaurant based in Kansas City. A woman of many skills, she has been a restaurateur and chef who does consultations for many restaurants and hotels that need innovative and new menus. She has gone on to use her exceptional culinary skills to write several culinary mysteries in the “Heaven Lee,” “Spice Box” series, and the “Big Platter Cookbook” which is a collection of recipes. Her popular “Heaven Lee” mysteries feature a woman named Heaven Lee, who is a former lawyer, restaurant owner, and restaurateur in Kansas City. She currently lives in Kansas City from where she writes her novels.

Temple went to the University of Missouri, from where she graduated with a degree in Administration of Justice and Communications. It was after graduation that she worked part-time working as a backstage caterer for a rock and roll producer. Using the proceeds from her job, she started her special events and catering business. She also managed and owned boutiques that stocked fashion items and vintage clothing. In 1989 she opened Café Lulu, her restaurant that showcased her world food menus before she shut down the restaurant in 1992 and got a job with a Kansas City grocery chain named “For Ball’s Food.” As the celebrity chef, she was the representative of more than 90 cooperative farms and created product recipes, created wine tasting programs, and marketed the product value of the farms. Lou Temple then got a job with a subsidiary of Hallmark Cards and her job involved consulting for food ideas, sourcing retail outlets, and managing special events. During this time, she also worked as a private chef at several high-end establishments. Outside food and catering, she has also worked on several film projects as assistant director and script supervisor on commercial shoots for the likes of Walmart, AT&T, Applebee’s, and Sonic Drive-Ins. She has also made short food films that were featured in the New York Food Film Festival. She has also worked in radio.

When Lou Jane Temple shut down her Café Lulu business in 1992, she had a lot of time on her hands and so started writing “The Marriage of Food and Wine,” a column about wine and food in the Kansas City Star. Temple continued writing about wine and food for nearly half a decade and still writes about wine and food in lifestyle magazines. She also worked for the Kansas City magazine as a restaurant reviewer. She published her first culinary mystery “Death by Rhubarb” though St. Martin’s Press in 1996. Between 1996 and 2002, she published seven titles in the “Heaven Lee” series. In 2004, she teamed up with the author A. Cort Sinnes and working with the Stewart, Tabori & Chang publishing house she published “The Big Platter Cookbook.” She launched a new cozy mystery series titled “Spice Box” with the publishing of the novel “The Spice Box in 2004. The second novel of the series was published in 2006.

Lou Jane Temple’s “Death by Rhubarb” introduces the lead character, Heaven Lee. She is the owner and operator of Café Heaven, a Kansas City restaurant that has been very successful and is always packed. After a long period of business and personal issues, Heaven manages to solve most of her problems and now believes the future is looking bright for the business. But then her newfound optimism and happiness are destroyed when her ex-husband comes into the café and then gets poisoned. To save the restaurant from the inevitable negative reputation and herself from a murder charge, she has to take drastic measures. She needs to become a private investigator and try to find the person responsible for killing her ex-husband. To help her out is a motley crew of neighborhood characters who can be very effective when they put their minds to it. Lou Temple writes a thrilling story that introduces her technique of throwing in recipes written with great detail to help one prepare the dishes she writes about. Critical to the success of the novel is the sense of community in the small town, which the author says is critical in the apprehension of the villain.

“Revenge of the Barbeque Queens” opens to Heaven Lee as the judge of a barbeque contest. She is one hell of a barbeque queen and one of the premier restaurateurs in Kansas City, which is why she is the go-to judge for events such as the “Barbeque World Series.” But then she finds herself in hot soup when she discovers the cold body of Pigpen Hopkins, a champion barbeque boss and overall obnoxious person. The body is in the extra special secret barbeque sauce he had been making before he went missing a few hours past. Unfortunately, Lee had a run-in with the authorities before, and even though she had not been found culpable, this time she will not find it so easy to disentangle herself. Barbeque experts had flocked into the town and with the prize money so lucrative, most of the cooks were willing to do anything to win. But then Heaven gets shot at while another celebrated cookbook author is shot. The stakes have been raised and the competition may now be who will get out alive.

Lou Jane Temple’s “A Stiff Risotto” is a thrilling novel that continues following the life and times of celebrated restaurateur Heaven Lee. As the owner of Café Heaven, one of the most popular eating spots in Kansas City she has been invited to the “Real Dish Food Festival” in Aspen. There is usually a lot of gossip at the festival and Lee knows that she has to watch her back. But everything goes haywire when she stumbles upon a body beaten to a pulp. It turns out that it was the body of one of the leading contestants who had presumably been murdered by a fellow competitor. The festival At Aspen is one of the largest in the world and it attracts more than five thousand gourmet experts from all over the world. They gather to gossip, enjoy the mountain air, and sip wine as the best chefs in the world battle it out for Best Chef in the World title. As such, when the best of the best start dropping off, the suspect list is unsurprisingly long. The bold Heaven learns that she may have some enemies that she may have to confront in her struggle to become a Hollywood great.