The Grave Gourmet (Capucine Culinary Mystery) - Hardcover

Alexander Campion started out as a true New Yorker, graduating from Columbia and migrating downtown to Wall Street. Early on, someone, a little apologetically, proposed he spend six months maximum in Paris helping out with a new venture his firm had just acquired. He stayed thirty five years, eventually becoming a restaurant critic and progressing inevitably to gastronomic thrillers.

Campion's debut introduces a beguiling heroine, 28-year-old Lt. Capucine Le Tellier of the Paris judicial police. Bored with her deskbound job pursuing white-collar crime, Capucine jumps at the chance to get involved in a possible murder investigation. The body of Jean-Louis Delage, the président-directeur général of the automaker Renault, has turned up in the refrigerator of Diapason, a three-star restaurant, where Delage dined earlier that evening with his lawyer. Diapason's owner, eminent chef Jean-Basile Labrousse, is well known to Capucine's restaurant critic husband, Alexandre. What at first appears to be a case of food poisoning is soon ruled a homicide. Capucine's family connections help open political doors and provide useful contacts as she uncovers a plot involving foreign nationals and industrial espionage. Full of amusing characters, this diverting gastronomic mystery builds to a most satisfactory conclusion. Readers will want a second helping. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.