'Chef Maurice and a Spot of Truffle' by J. A. Lang

Published by Purple Panda Press.
7 April 2015.
ISBN 978-1-910679-02-9

Chef Maurice is an endearing character with an insatiable appetite for good food.  He has a French restaurant - Le Cochon Rouge - in the village of Beakley in the Cotswolds and he enjoys sourcing the very best ingredients for his cooking.  He, therefore, pursues Ollie, the errant local supplier of mushrooms when the forager fails to deliver the fungi to the restaurant.  A comic process of varying visitors to the gentleman's cottage leads Chef Maurice to find truffles amongst the supplies in the cottage.  

Baulked of the opportunity to remove the truffles, Chef Maurice decides to find a dog from the local dogs home, The Helping Paws Pet Sanctuary, to train as a truffle hunter; he finds instead among the Miscellaneous Mammals, Hamilton, a micro-pig who seems ideally suited to the role. In fact the chef soon grows very fond of his acquisition.  In the pursuit of training the pig, Hamilton, to find truffles in the woods Chef Maurice finds the dead body of the errant forager.

Other events transpire to complicate matters including a pignapping but finally, in true Poirot fashion, Chef Maurice discovers the murderer and kidnapper.

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Reviewer: Jennifer S. Palmer

This is the first book of a series  -  there are already two more adventures about the insouciant Chef Maurice in print.

J.A. Lang is the author of the Chef Maurice Mysteries, set in the fictional Cotswold village of Beakley, conveniently located within driving distance of her home in Oxford, England. She lives with her husband, an excessive number of cookbooks, and a sourdough starter named Bob.When not at her writing desk, she enjoys cooking, eating, travelling to places with good food, drinking good wine, and thinking about her next meal. (Please note that any similarities between J.A. Lang and her main character, Chef Maurice, are purely coincidental.)

 

http://www.jalang.net

Jennifer Palmer Throughout my reading life crime fiction has been a constant interest; I really enjoyed my 15 years as an expatriate in the Far East, the Netherlands & the USA but occasionally the solace of closing my door to the outside world and sitting reading was highly therapeutic. I now lecture to adults on historical topics including Famous Historical Mysteries.