Knife Skills for Beginners
A Novel
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The Maid meets Top Chef in this first novel in a new cozy crime series, where at a Belgravia cookery school, murder is on the menu.
At a Belgravia cookery school, murder is on the menu
A recipe for disaster.
When chef Paul Delamare agrees to help his old friend Christian by teaching at an exclusive residential cookery school in Belgravia, the only thing he expects his students to murder is his taste buds. But on the first night, the unthinkable happens: someone turns up dead.
The school rests on a knife-edge.
Could one of his students be the killer? Or could it be Rose—the owner of the school, a woman with secrets and a murky past? The police are convinced Paul is the culprit. After all, he’s good with a blade, was first on the scene—and everyone knows what chefs are really like.
It all boils down to murder.
The students are sharpening their knives, and if Paul can’t solve the mystery fast—as well as teach them how to make a perfect hollandaise sauce—he’ll be the next to get the chop.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
MasterChef semifinalist Murrin puts his culinary expertise to good use in this charming debut mystery featuring London chef Paul Delamere. After culinary celebrity Christian Wagner breaks his arm, he asks Delamere to substitute for him at a posh Westminster cooking school. Delamere agrees, happy both for the extra cash and for the distraction from mourning the recent death of his partner. Delamere's eight students, each of whom will board at the school for the duration of the weeklong course, include an aristocrat, her daughter, a pharmacist, and a last-minute sign-up who knows the school's administrator. At first, Delamere's charges are disappointed that the hunky Wagner won't be teaching them, but gradually, he wins them over. His good fortune runs out, though, when he finds a corpse in the kitchen, its head nearly severed by a meat cleaver Delamere had used to chop up pigeon carcasses earlier the same day. Delamere becomes the obvious suspect, forcing him to ferret out which of his students is the real killer before he winds up in prison. Murrin delivers a brisk, funny variation on the classic closed-circle formula. A sequel would be welcome.
