Chanterelles garnished with cream and mayhem
Chanterelles garnished with cream and mayhem.
To Gina, cooking a great meal is an act of love. A life-affirming gift. An art she inherited from a French chef grandfather felled by a robber's bullet. Cooking for a Michelin-starred restaurant, she finds a new enchanting world. But danger lurks where least expected. Can she survive and thrive in this life of privilege, pleasure, and menace?
For Gina, the protagonist of Sugar and Spice and All Those Lies, cooking a wonderful meal is an art. An act of love. An act of grace. A gift that affirms and gives life. Not only does it nurture those who partake of the meal, it also feeds the soul of the creator. These are lessons Gina learns from her mother, daughter of an unfortunate French chef.
Gina is a young woman born to poor parents. A nobody keen to taste life outside the world she was born into. She gets lucky when she’s chosen to cook at a Michelin-starred restaurant where she could create inventive recipes. She enters a world of a privileged class with money to spare for dinners that cost hundreds of dollars.
In this heady, scintillating atmosphere, she meets new friends and new challenges—pastry chef Marcia, filthy rich client Leon, and Brent, a brooding homicide detective investigating an incident that lands her in the hospital. But this new world is also one of unexpected danger.
Can the lessons Gina learned from her mother about cooking and life help her survive and thrive in this other world of privilege, pleasure, and menace?
Though food and cooking play a big part in this novel, it is less about recipes. Rather, it’s more about Gina’s growth and inner journey. San Francisco Review gave Sugar and Spice and All Those Lies five stars.
