TO KILL A COOK

A ballsy restaurant critic turns amateur detective to discover the truth behind a beloved Manhattan chef’s death.

Bernice Black adores chef Laurent Tirel, her friend and food mentor, almost as much as the gourmet meals her always-hungry stomach craves. About a week before a party she plans to throw at Laurent’s restaurant for her fiancé, Toru, she discovers the chef’s severed head in a refrigerator, preserved in a magnificent batch of aspic. In this quirky, fast-paced novel, Akers follows Bernice through 1970s New York as she desperately tries to solve the mystery of Laurent’s death in one week and write about it to meet the article deadline at her soon-to-be-defunct magazine job. Armed with an unabashedly foul mouth and grit to spare, she descends into a gourmet underworld populated by drug-addled, hypercompetitive chefs, a sexy reporter trying to steal her scoop, and mobster food connoisseurs who temporarily kidnap Bernice then tip her off when they find Laurent’s surly maître d’—and prime suspect—dead in a dumpster. Undeterred, the narrator quickly finds herself not only seeking answers to her friend’s death, but to how she can reconcile long-suppressed desires for women that manifest in a private addiction to “trashy lesbian pulps” and a more public life as the live-in fiancée of a Japanese American mystery writer. The often comedic unexpectedness of each twist in tandem with Akers’ scrupulous attention to period detail and to the character portraits work together to create an uproarious romp of a novel that is as memorable as it is satisfying.

A delectably unhinged mystery served with wit, bravado, and a generous splash of gourmet chaos.