Death Of A Chef (A 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 smart, delicious French procedural series returns for a fourth adventure. Commissaire Capucine LeTellier receives a call from a good friend, who has discovered a body in her just-delivered vintage Louis Vuitton trunk. The dead man is three-star-rated Chef Jean-Louis Brault, recently scorned by restaurant critic Lucien Folon. Capucine and her restaurant-critic husband, Alexandre, use their contacts to ferret out clues from the French dining and wine world. When the body of a famous politician turns up next, with ties to the Brault case, Capucine is discouraged from snooping further, but she and her colleagues pursue several lines of inquiry quietly, looking into the chef’s bankrupt hotel, a mysterious childhood incident, his unusual collecting habits, and his girlfriend, among others. The dialogue and food references will entertain readers, while the many plotlines will keep them turning pages. This is another skillfully constructed mystery from the talented Campion. Fans of Katherine Hall Page will enjoy this one. --Amy Alessio