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The Gourmet Detective (Culinary Mysteries), by Peter King
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Meet the Gourmet Detective. A chef-turned-culinary sleuth, the Gourmet Detective tracks down obscure ingredients and unravels difficult recipes for rival restaurateurs -- until a guest unexpectedly drops dead at the prestigious Circle of Careme dinner. Drawing upon his epicurean and investigative skills, the Gourmet Detective hunts the killer among omelettes Bourguignonne and vats of Madeira sauce. Featuring many real recipes and actual cooking techniques, this delightful mystery is a charming romp through the kitchens of the finest gourmands.
- Sales Rank: #1546739 in Books
- Published on: 1997-08-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 6.75" h x .63" w x 4.25" l,
- Binding: Mass Market Paperback
- 256 pages
From Publishers Weekly
This series debut by a Cordon Bleu chef leads readers on a cook's tour of haute cuisine, replete with tantalizing descriptions of food and its preparation, robust wit and an appropriately culinary murder. London's "Gourmet Detective," whose business is "locating rare and exotic foods, advising on substitutes for scarce products, finding alternate sources of ingredients," is hired by Francois Duquesne to find out who is sabotaging his famous restaurant by confiscating shipments of food and planting mice in the larder. The unnamed detective, who narrates the tale, is in attendance at the prestigious Circle of Careme banquet at Francois's restaurant when an influential TV journalist is poisoned. Asked to assist in the investigation by Scotland Yard's Food Squad inspector, the Gourmet Detective traces the media-steeped case to its conclusion. King serves up an entertaining puzzle as his hearty main course, rounding out the offering with food facts, references to mystery literature and exotic ingredients (among them ortolans and turbot) and snappy one-liners. The hero declares at the end that he's had enough of murder and will stick "with mangoes and marjoram from now on." Readers will hope he doesn't mean it.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
The unnamed Gourmet Detective is an ex-chef, whodunit buff, and hopeful hero and narrator of a projected series. He makes a living consulting on hard-to-create menus and hard-to-trace ingredients--until drawn into a more practical challenge by a London restaurateur who feels that his operation is being sabotaged. When a hated investigative reporter is murdered at the prestigious Circle of Cƒreme dinner--Tartelettes … la Dijonnaise, Brouillade d'Oeufs MystŠre, and, for the poison course, eels marinated in Tintulinum botulinum--the Gourmet Detective is fired by his client but tapped for assistance by Inspector Hemingway of Scotland Yard's ``Food Squad.'' Sleuthing follows in a frenetic but somewhat flavorless round of cocktail-hour flirtation, back-alley spying, and brain-picking under false pretenses. It concludes with a second Circle of Cƒreme dinner featuring Asparagus Vinaigrette Mimosa, Nougatine Glac‚e au Caf‚, and a denouement revealing the murderer--a surprise only because, given the author's demi-glac‚- thin characterization, we may have forgotten meeting him/her before. Cordon Bleu chef/first-novelist King crams his pages with food and fictional allusions, writing like a dedicated hobbyist who, unfortunately, can't be bothered with style. A derivative series idea that falls flat. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"This appealign detective serves up nuggets of culinary trivia and wry foode humor." -People
"This series debut by a Cordon Bleu chef leads readers on a cook's tour of haute cuisine, replete with tantalizing descriptions of food and its preparation, robust wit and an appropriately culinary murder." -Publisher's Weekly
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
A Luxurious Kaleidoscope of Flavor, Plush and Brilliant With Flashes of Mystery Muscle and Gourmet Nuance
By Linda G. Shelnutt
This is the pilot of a true gourmet mystery series by a distinguished, professional chef/writer. The novel opens with the feel of the heft and breadth of Nero Wolfe visiting the office of Peter King's Gourmet Detective, requesting to be a client. Instead of Nero, though, one of the top 3 restaurateurs in London, Raymond Lefebvre is asking King's unique detective to discover and hand over the preparation secrets of the house recipe (Oiseau Royale) of his main competitor, Francois Duquesne of Le Trouquet d'Or, a second in the top 3 London eateries.
The sense of Nero Wolfe's heft and the casual tossing of terms of the highest of highbrow in culinary arts immediately fed my reading ambiance requirements and seated me solidly into the plot. I remained there absolutely, through-thick-and-thin tastes from heaven, through a labyrinth of gourmet mystery machinations, to the denouement in a banquet room, in which Inspector Hemingway popped the plot like a boil, with the precision of laser surgery, sans the gooey mess. Hemingway's maneuvering of a room plush with suspects showed a subtly grand finesse in competition with Agatha Chistie's Hercule Poirot, in my book.
(Which was a used copy from Lori Phillips, Amazon vender "lorisbookstore." I chose that copy because it was signed by editor Joe Veldt of St. Martin's Dead Letter Mysteries.)
Several mystery series have been touted as taking over the Christie legacy, and I have immensely enjoyed those which I've read, raving them to celestial ceilings in reviews. However, in this case, at and through the denouement THE GOURMET DETECTIVE didn't need to be touted. That scene did the deed in creme brulee spades. It went over the top, with just the right titration ("titre" in French) of panache to be legally dubbed the "creme de la creme" of The British Detective Novel Reveal.
The plot executed several unusual twists which stretched the norm of some of the strongest mysteries, while including a plethora of taste-bud-uptake-inhibitors, and arriving beyond the farthest-out-fancies of the food industry of London.
Whew. Whoa, and Wow. And a rapture of Yum. Now I have at least a clue of the nuances of ingredients, preparations, tastes, textures, and flavors of innumerable exotic dishes, whose foreign names I can't pronounce let alone remember. (However, if dripping tongues have memory cells, I'm in the creme!)
This novel was thoroughly packed with exquisite fictional "substance" of a variety of flavors, so much so that I was forced, with pleasure, to read it very slowly.
I read the second book in the series first (SPICED TO DEATH, see my lengthy review), mostly because the sequel was in Amazon's stock of Super Shipping Savers and I was a bit leery of the vender deals (having now easily and successfully purchased 4 books from various venders I no longer have a single qualm there). But, the main point in this paragraph is the different moods I felt between the pilot and its sequel in this series.
Though both books were superbly successful escape reads for me, I did notice that the composing styles were quite different, even though the Gourmet Detective character had the same personality in both novels.
As a related aside maybe I should note that true feminists might be grandly, even grossly put off by this character's attitudes toward females; however, to me the GD is who he is. At first I scrunched my nose, then easily decided to like him, foibles included.
In the pilot, the GD behaved more as the average P.I. does, set into the plot opening with a new client seated across the desk of the P.I.'s somewhat seedy, lackluster office, as the P.I. carries on an internal dialogue titled "To pay or not to pay the month's bills." The P.I.'s classic behavior is carried throughout the pilot, with bits of finesse added into the mystique of GD not being a "real" private eye. But, wait! The GD is enamored of that fictional genre and interestingly spouts almost as many titles and P.I. characters as does Carolyn Hart's Death on Demand series.
In the sequel, the GD does not spend as much time touching base with his office (can't recall exactly how much difference in time not spent) and spouts less about the contrasts between the "fictional" and "real" worlds of the P.I. These nose-in-the-air, ironic points to contrast from "reality" to "fiction," within fiction are not anything new in plot ploys, but I rather enjoyed the way Peter King regularly used this technique in the pilot, and I may have "grieved" the lack of these comparisons in the sequel, if I hadn't read it first.
Though the sequel succeeded excellently for me as entertaining fiction of the highest order, I do wonder what caused the diminishment of certain qualities which I relished in the pilot. Did Peter King naturally, instinctively evolve his style differently in the sequel, or was he guided by what he and/or his editors determined was a preference from reader feedback. Most of us know about the squeaky wheel syndrome which can sometimes shift/skew conclusions such that the true preferences of the reader majority might not have been clearly determined in these choices of style changes.
So, who cares about this evolution of style of a mystery series?
I obviously do, especially because I would sense a very, very great loss to the good taste in the mystery reading masses... if this excellent, sensual, sophisticated (but very approachable) series were to be discontinued, and the early books were to go permanently out of print.
This series and the Chas Wheatley series by Phyllis Richman (see my Listmania and reviews) are the two best authentically gourmet mystery series (which I've read) which are still (barely) on the market today. How lucky we are these series have been written by premier chefs or established, in-the-know food columnists from that currently elevated industry, true culinary artists who also happen to be great novelists.
How can we, as readers of good taste, allow such luxurious offerings to go "down the tubes" due to a misreading of what we want and will buy??!!
Thankfully, a few used copies of THE GOURMET DETECTIVE are still available through Amazon venders.
I've put # 3 in this series on my Wish List and will include it in my next Amazon purchase. I would order all the books in this collection at once, but this is a series to savor, not to speed through. However, we'll see what happens after I read # 3. Though I rarely court a burping indigestion by speeding my reading pleasures, I may have been shoved beyond savoring by then, into immediately ordering every last book featuring the Gourmet Detective.
Respectfully Submitted,
Linda G. Shelnutt
Oops. Just realized I may have been misleading. I used the words "authentically gourmet" to set that small category aside from other culinary and cozy mysteries I've read and reviewed, which have all been as entertaining to me, each in their unique ways, as the two series I've noted above.
However, though most culinary authors have great, approachable recipes and mouth-watering, in plot cooking; not even Diane Mott Davidson is an all-around-gourmet chef (or food columnist) by profession, in the sense that Peter King and Phyllis Richman are.
Joanne Pence's Angie Amalfi series and Tamar Myers's PenDutch series still top my list of all-around-favorite cozy culinaries.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
A few ingredients short
By Andrew S. Rogers
Following the lead of my old economics professor William Breit -- who, as one half of the pseudonymous writing team Marshall Jevons gave us a murder-solving economist in 'The Fatal Equilibrium' and other titles -- more and more writers have served up murder mysteries in which someone uses the particular skills of his line of work to unravel a whodunit and bring the killers to justice. Peter King makes a noble attempt in this first entry in his by-now-long-running series. But while parts of the story were quite good, as a murder mystery, it was ultimately unsatisfying.
Like the Continental Op, our hero is unnamed. But he (like his creator, clearly) is a fan of detective fiction. Much of the book has an oddly self-aware quality, therefore -- especially when the hero and his Scotland Yard counterpart compare their interactions to those of famous fictional detectives and policemen. It's amusing at first to see the detective asking himself how Peter Wimsey or Charlie Chan would handle a certain situation, but even that begins to grow old after a while. Similarly, though it's refreshing that the author rejects the convention of the omnicompetent and almost omniscient sleuth -- the hero frequently complains that Holmes would have done a better job understanding a clue, or Travis McGee a difficult situation -- the solution to the crime, when it comes, struck me as in many ways unrelated to what our hero had been doing for the last 200 pages. Had I been following the wrong character around London?
Still, this is a fascinating concept, and not too bad for a first book. Certainly, the author knows his food (or at least, can snow an amateur foodie like me). I'm going to give some of the later titles in the series a try, and see if maybe things don't improve a bit over time.
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
An excellent gourmet book, as for a mystery...
By Karina A Suarez
I must admit I have savored this book very much. The Gourmet Detective is definitely a "gourmet"; as for being a detective...well, even himself doesn't use the term. I find the story a bit flat, the characters are not fleshed out at all, and the cute Sergeant Winnie seems a bit chauvinist, like dragged from nowhere into the story just to satisfy our protagonist's necessity for a link between him and the Police, while at the same time fullfilling his manly ego. I want to say I'm not a feminist, but the book suggests it that way. It's too obvious.
Another cause for dissappointment is that we never know the real identity of the protagonist. We just know he is the Gourmet Detective. Minor detail, I know, but still exasparating.
The volume is, however, extremely informative, even creative, as a food manual. Peter King is definitely not an amateur in this area. But then again, he probably should have written a cookbook. All this vast information about food and the appropiate wine to go with it would make a marvellous gourmet-reference book; but for a mystery, more of a storyline is needed; without cliches, and definitely not sexist.
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