Cold Case! Mission Defrostable (Lady Pancake and Sir French Toast) by Josh Funk

Down in the gloomiest nook of the fridge,
past Veggie Valley and Rosemary Ridge,
meeting in secret behind Pickle Post,
sat Lady Pancake beside Sir FrenchToast.

Something sinister is afoot in the fridge.

There is a mysterious chill in the atmosphere. Lady Pancake's carefully-curled coiffure looks as if she's had it frosted. Sir French Toast's wig is icy. Is the compressor out of control? The thermometer miscalibrated?

The coolest sleuths in the kitchen are called to take the case!

Agent Asparagus flashed an I.D.

You're the two heroes that I've come to see!

Before their home turns into the new Ice Age, Sir French Toast and Lady Pancake have a mission--to stop the glaciation before it turns all the fresh food in the fridge into popsicles. There's only one place to look for the cold-blooded crook--in the FREEZER! But before they can venture into that icy realm, there is one more carb character they need to recruit--the cold and calculating frozen Baron von Waffle.

Pancake explained what they needed to do.

"You know the freezer. We're lost without you!"

Will crusty old Baron von Waffle join in their mission to save the green veggies in the crisper from becoming frozen forever? Will the real sub-zero perpetrator be unmasked as the daring pair stalk the cold-hearted villain in the upper realms of refrigeration?

Or will this episode turn out to be the foodie version of Frozen?

In a plot that might have been penned by author Agatha Frostie herself, there's a warm ending in store for the two starchy sleuths in a delicious denouement in which the Peach Boys come out of retirement for a spot of surfing the shelves in a gatefold that reveals a COOL (but not too cool) celebration of calibrated refrigeration. It's the latest spoof of the mystery detective genre by the always chill Josh Funk. In his third in series, Mission Defrostable (Lady Pancake and Sir French Toast) (Sterling Books, 2018), Funk's artist sidekick (and partner in crime) Brendan Kearney provides the animated and anthropomorphized foodstuffs in his usual lively pastel illustrations.

Serve this one up with a warm cup of cocoa, along with more of the refrigerator investigator genre in Lady Pancake and Sir French Toast and The Case of the Stinky Stench (Lady Pancake and Sir French Toast) (see review here).