Review: CHEF MAURICE AND A SPOT OF TRUFFLE, J.A. Lang

• ISBN: 978 1 910679 02 9
  
• Publisher: Purple Panda Press
• Publication Date: 7 April 2015
• source: review copy supplied by author 
• available on Kindle

Synopsis (author website)

“They say one should never trust a thin chef. By this measure, Chef Maurice was very trustworthy indeed.”

Take one sleepy Cotswold village, mix in one Poirot-esque murder mystery, add a larger-than-life French chef with an appetite for solving crime, and season with clues and red herrings galore . . . 

It’s autumn in the Cotswolds, and Chef Maurice is facing a problem of mushrooming proportion.

Not only has his wild herb and mushroom supplier, Ollie Meadows, missed his weekly delivery—he’s missing vital signs too, when he turns up dead in the woods near Beakley village.

Soon, Chef Maurice is up to his nose in some seriously rotten business—complete with threatening notes, a pignapping, and an extremely well-catered stake-out.

Can he solve Ollie’s murder before his home-made investigation brings the killer out for second helpings?

My take

I do like the occasional cosy and found this first in the Chef Maurice series a light-hearted and entertaining read. Chef Maurice, long time resident of the Cotswolds, is a larger than life character, who loves to try new dishes. When his local supplier of mushrooms and herbs goes missing, Maurice's curiosity is piqued when he finds thousands of pounds worth of truffles in Ollie's refrigerator. 

Maurice is convinced that Ollie has actually found a local but hitherto unknown cache of rare truffles, but looking for them gets Chef Maurice into trouble he hadn't bargained for. At the same time there is a mystery or two to be solved.

The main characters in this story are humourously and well drawn. Recommended if you enjoy the occasional cosy.

 

My rating: 4.0

About the author

J.A. Lang is a British mystery author, living in Oxford, England. She is the author of the Chef Maurice series of culinary mysteries. See Facebook