February 02, 2026
Putnam/Gianna Smorto
'To Kill a Chef,' the new culinary murder mystery by Philly author W.M. Akers, follows restaurant critic and amateur detective Bernice Black across 1970s New York.
Imagine a mold of gelatin jiggling in a kitchen fridge. It's not lime green Jell-O but aspic, the savory meat jelly that once haunted mid-century American dinner tables. This one has bits of pimento cheese and cabbage swirling inside it.
Now imagine there's a head floating in the middle. That's the striking scene that kickstarts the action in "To Kill a Cook," the new mystery novel from Philly-based author W.M. Akers out Tuesday.
MORE: For many couples, McGillin's is 'more than just a bar.' It's where their love stories began
Akers, who admits he's tried aspic and "it wasn't for me," has lived in the city since 2019. "To Kill a Cook," however, is set in his former home of New York City. The scene is 1970s Manhattan, and the person who stumbles upon the stomach-churning jelly mold is Bernice Black, restaurant critic for the fictional New York Sentinel magazine. She's a longtime friend of the deceased, fading celebrity chef Laurent Tirel, and starts hunting for his killer – for justice but also a career-saving scoop.
When she's not prodding sources for information or wrangling her fiance's kids, Bernice is eating the greasiest, strangest and most elaborate foods the city has to offer. Akers poured over retro cookbooks like Julia Child's classic "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" for help writing these scenes. He also leaned on his mother, who worked in New York restaurants in the '70s and '80s and pointed him to treasure troves like "New York Entertains," a collection of themed menus from the Junior League of New York City. Bernice narrowly avoids a dinner party featuring one of those menus – an "East Asian" buffet featuring hot spiced beef with orange flavor.
Period pieces are old hat for Akers, 38, who typically time travels for his work. He made his fiction debut with "Westside," a critically acclaimed mystery set in the 1920s, and followed it up with two sequels. Even his tabletop games look to the past. "Deadball: Baseball with Dice" lets players build dream rosters and replay old World Series; its expansions riff on the Black Sox Scandal and the sport's "dirtier and meaner" era in the early 1900s.
Falling into a rabbit hole of reference material is part of the draw for Akers. He looped the cast recording of Stephen Sondheim's 1970 musical "Company" and watched "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" for fashion notes while writing "To Kill a Cook." But Akers also thinks his writing style is suited for a bygone time. A reader pointed this out to him during his undergrad days at New York University, where he majored in playwriting.
"I remember one time I wrote something that was supposed to be set in the present day," he said, recalling a college class. "And somebody said, I love the way your characters talk. They all talk like they're from the past. And I was like, oh, well, they're supposed to sound like they're from the 21st century, but maybe I should lean into that. So for a very long time, I've written a lot of period stuff.
"I don't know if it's my sensibility or just the way that I talk or the type of culture that I was raised on and continue to ingest, but for some reason my characters seem to fit very nicely in the past."
There's an old school versus new world tension in "To Kill a Chef," which finds Bernice toggling between the French fine dining that Tirel championed and the emerging New American cuisine that's edging him out. That dynamic is also playing out in her industry. The Sentinel, on the verge of shuttering its magazine, is competing with the hipper, scuzzier St. Mark's Arch. Its flirtatious editor Susan also has Bernice questioning her sexuality.
Though she eventually puzzles that out – and unmasks the murderer through a carefully constructed dessert – Bernice has more story to tell. Akers has already written another book starring his amateur detective, this one focused on the vegetarian cooking and health food that proliferated in the '70s. It's tentatively titled "Dead as Dirt," but does not yet have a release date.
While he's open to writing more Bernice Black books, the author is also scheming up his first novel set in Philadelphia. That one is in much earlier stages, he says, but will be set in the present and likely in Manayunk, where he currently resides with his wife and two sons.
"There's a lot of oddballs around here, and I think it would be a fun setting," Akers said. "I'm sort of imagining it as an English village murder mystery, but set in this odd little corner of Northwest Philadelphia."
Follow Kristin & PhillyVoice on Twitter: @kristin_hunt
| @thePhillyVoice
Like us on Facebook: PhillyVoice
Have a news tip? Let us know.
