After New York food critic Bernice Black stumbles across a severed head floating in a mold of aspic, two big questions arise: who would want the famed French chef Laurent Tirel dead? And who had the skills to make such a perfect aspic? Bernice is determined to solve this murder mystery set in the fine dining restaurant world of 1970s New York City in W.M. Akers’ new book, To Kill a Cook.
W.M Akers is the author of the mystery novels Critical Hit, Westside, and Westside Saints and the creator of the bestselling game Deadball: Baseball With Dice. In a recent What We’re Reading interview, Akers noted that after time spent as a playwright, he returned to fiction writing and specifically mystery novels. He explained, “I just think there's something wonderfully simple and fun about a story that starts off with a dead body and being able to play with the conventions of the detective investigating a killer and interviewing suspects and running all over town.”
To Kill a Cook is a highly entertaining, and delicious murder mystery. Akers’ 1970s New York City is gritty and fast-paced; the hero Bernice Black is witty and also fast-paced. And she knows her food.
Akers described his character, “She is somebody who absolutely lives to eat, and she's equally at home at a lunch counter or the absolute most luxe French restaurant in New York City. She moves between them with ease. She says that she is excited to eat anything as long as she feels like the cook isn't wasting her time. And that there's nothing she doesn't like except lima beans and even those she'll probably eat if you put enough butter on them.”
Solving the murder also means saving her job. The investigation takes Bernice all over Manhattan and into Brooklyn. She is consumed by finding the murderer even though her relationship with her fiancé is in trouble and all the while she is aware of a growing attraction to another woman.
Akers explained, “She has what should be a very comfortable heterosexual relationship, but she's feeling this urge to explore her sexuality and figure out what that means. And part of the story of the book is her trying to figure out how to come out to her fiancé and what that's going to mean for their future.”
One might be thinking by now: of all the foods in the world, why feature aspic in the story?
Akers dug deep into culinary history for To Kill a Cook. He explained, “One of the reasons that I set this book in 1972 is I really love that moment in culinary history because you've got all of this stuff that seems sort of frighteningly old-fashioned, like ham and aspic, but you've also got the beginnings of what we see as what fine dining looks like today, like fresh ingredients, seasonal cooking, all that kind of new American stuff. So it's like a cool moment in history where those two things are colliding … The head in aspic was the first idea that I had for this novel, because to me it just symbolizes all of that very old school, very difficult, very challenging, but to us, very weird types of cooking.”
Learn more about W.M. Akers and his work on his webpage.
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