Savvy Summers and the Sweet Potato Crimes: A Mystery

A sparkling debut mystery set on the South Side of Chicago, featuring the quick-witted, unforgettable Savvy Summers, proprietor of a soul food café.

When Savvy Summers first opened Essie's soul food café, she never expected her customer-favorite sweet potato pie to become the center of a murder investigation. But when Grandy Jaspers, the 75-year-old neighborhood womanizer, drops dead at table two, she suddenly has more to worry about than just maintaining Essie's reputation for the finest soul food in the Chicagoland area.

Even as the police deem Grandy's death an accident, Savvy quickly finds herself--and her beloved café--in the middle of an entire city's worth of bad press. Desperate to clear her name and keep her business afloat, Savvy and her snooping assistant manager, Penny Lopés, take it upon themselves to find who really killed Grandy.

But with a slimy investor harassing her to sell her name and business, customers avoiding her sweet potato pie like the plague, and her police sergeant ex-husband suddenly back in the picture, will Savvy be able to clear the café's name and solve Grandy's murder before it all falls apart?

After all, while Savvy always said her sweet potato pie was to die for, she never meant literally.

Author: Sandra Jackson-Opoku
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Published: 07/29/2025
Pages: 336
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.88lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.74w x 1.13d
ISBN: 9781250351906


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 06/01/2025 pg. 3
Booklist 06/01/2025 pg. 37
Shelf Awareness 07/27/2025
Kirkus Reviews 07/01/2025

About the Author
SANDRA JACKSON-OPOKU is the author of the award-winning novel, The River Where Blood is Born and Hot Johnny and the Women Who Loved Him, an Essence Magazine Bestseller in Hardcover Fiction. She also coedited the anthology Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks. Her fiction, nonfiction, and dramatic works are widely published and produced in Adi Magazine, Midnight & Indigo, Aunt Chloe, Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction, New Daughters of Africa, Obsidian, Another Chicago Magazine, storySouth, Lifeline Theatre, the Chicago Humanities Festival, and others.