Book Reviews

The Secret Spice Café Trilogy

Patricia V. Davis, author of spellbinding and captivating stories and creator of complex characters, weaves stories with unique twists aboard an unusual location in The Secret Spice Café Trilogy.

Book One of The Secret Spice Café Trilogy: Cooking for Ghosts


A Vegas cocktail waitress. An Indian herbalist. A British chemistry professor. An Italian-American widow. Four unique women with one thing in common: each is haunted by a tragedy from her past.

Cynthia, Rohini, Jane, and Angela meet on a food blogging site and bond over recipes. They open The Secret Spice, an elegant café on the magnificent ocean liner, the RMS Queen Mary, currently a floating hotel in Long Beach, California. Rich in history and tales of supernatural occurrences, the ship hides her own dark secrets.

The women are surrounded by ghosts long before they step aboard, and once they do, nothing is quite what it seems. Not the people they meet, not their brooding chef’s mystic recipes, and not the Queen Mary herself.

Nominated for the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Cooking for Ghosts is an unforgettable tale of love, redemption, and divine female power. 

Book Two of The Secret Spice Café Trilogy: Spells & Oregano

A mother desperate to save her twin sons, a war veteran in torment, a beautiful young psychic with a terrible secret, a powerful magician with a shattered soul, and a Queen steeped in history and glory. These extraordinary beings cross paths and set off a remarkable chain of events.

Patricia spins past and present, mystery and magic, into a potent story of passionate longing and family tragedy all at once. Spells and Oregano is a compelling tale of atonement, devotion, and undying love, set aboard one of the world’s most magnificent, haunted ships.

Book Three of The Secret Spice Café Trilogy: Demons, Well-Seasoned

Dare to Believe in Your Power…

A long-lost grandmother. A stay-at-home mom. A comic book fan. A five-year-old girl with a star-shaped birthmark. And nine more.

The cast is bigger, the stakes are higher. When Sarita’s grandmother, a Vodou priestess, foresees a terrible evil, Cynthia, Jane, Angela, and Rohini reunite on a heart-rending mission to save all that’s precious to them, including the iconic ship, the RMS Queen Mary. They cannot do it alone—the priestess tells them there must be “thirteen on the night of the thirteenth moon” in this life-or-death pursuit. Can she be trusted?

Spiced with history and the supernatural, Demons, Well-Seasoned takes us from 1930s Glasgow, to New Orleans and Harlem in the 1950s, to present day southern California, and back again, on a metaphysical voyage that is both exhilarating and poignant. But before you embark upon this final sail with the denizens of The Secret Spice, be warned: expect to lose sleep, and keep tissues at hand. These valiant characters might just stay with you long after their story comes to a close.

Patricia V. Davis is a graduate of Queens College, City University of New York. She was a student at Long Island University CW Post Campus, Brookville, New York, where she added to her existing master’s degree in creative writing and education.

She married a Greek national and moved with him to Athens, Greece, where she lived for seven years before returning to the US. Their tumultuous relationship, divorce, and her eventual empowerment led to her memoir: Harlot’s Sauce: a Memoir of Food, Family, Love and Loss and Greece.

When a blog post she had written went viral, her second non-fiction book was born, The Diva Doctrine: 16 Universal Principles Every Woman Needs to Know. The book covers everything from appearance, parenthood, break ups with friends, and relating to men.

When Patricia was invited to attend a women’s conference by Maria Shriver, the only available hotel room was on the RMS Queen Mary. Her experience aboard the ship was the inspiration for The Secret Spice Café trilogy.

Please follow and like us:
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram