Lou Jane Temple Books in Order

If you want the main Kansas City series: Death by Rhubarb → Revenge of the Barbeque Queens → A Stiff Risotto
If you like later Heaven Lee cases: Bread on Arrival → The Cornbread Killer → Red Beans and Vice → Death Is Semisweet
If you prefer historical mysteries: The Spice Box → Death du Jour
If you want the cookbook first: The Big Platter Cookbook

Lou Jane Temple was born in Junction City, Kansas, in 1944 and spent her early years there before moving to Kansas City in the late 1960s. She became one of those hard-to-pin-down creative people whose career never stayed in one lane for long.

Before the mystery novels, there were shops, art, radio work, and a lot of food. Temple studied photography at the Kansas City Art Institute, worked retail jobs, ran businesses including clothing and vintage stores, and built the kind of life where hospitality and performance kept crossing paths.

Food became the steady thread. She cooked for restaurant and catering jobs, did backstage catering for major rock shows, and eventually opened Cafe Lulu on West 39th Street in Kansas City in the early 1990s. Cafe Lulu was not just a restaurant, it was also a meeting place for writers, performers, and regulars who liked a little mischief with dinner.

Writing came later, but it made sense once it arrived. Temple wrote freelance food pieces and contributed to Kansas City magazine, then in 1996 she published Death by Rhubarb, the first of her Heaven Lee mysteries. It let her fold kitchens, menus, and local color straight into crime fiction.

Food was never just decoration in her books.

The Heaven Lee novels are the clearest example of that mix. Heaven is a former attorney and Kansas City restaurateur who keeps stumbling into murder while trying to run Cafe Heaven. In books like Revenge of the Barbeque Queens, Bread on Arrival, and The Cornbread Killer, Temple used contests, festivals, neighborhood politics, and restaurant pressure as the machinery of the plot. The books are full of good food, sharp talk, community gossip, and capable women who know how to keep moving when a room goes sideways.

She later shifted into historical mystery with The Spice Box and Death du Jour. Those books follow cooks in earlier eras and use kitchens as a way into bigger social worlds, Civil War-era New York in one, revolutionary Paris in the other. Even when the setting changed, Temple kept returning to the same basic idea, that food tells you who has power, who does the work, and who gets left out.

She also wrote for people who wanted to cook, not just read about cooking.

In 2004 she coauthored The Big Platter Cookbook with A. Cort Sinnes, a book built around relaxed, family-style entertaining. Outside publishing, she cooked at the James Beard House and later worked seasonally as a private chef on Islesboro, Maine. Temple stayed closely tied to Kansas City for decades, and late in life she lived with her daughter on Tybee Island, Georgia, after years of travel that included favorite trips to Paris, Morocco, and Oaxaca. She died in 2023, but her fiction still feels lived in. The restaurants are busy, the cooks are tired, the guests are dramatic, and dinner still has to go out.