It’s been a while since my last review, and I’m starting to
get out of practice. I can’t quite figure out how to start today’s review of Chef Maurice and a Spot of Truffle (2015)
by J. A. Lang. How to describe today’s book? Imagine, if you will, a culinary
mystery. Make that a culinary mystery solved by an eccentric French chef named
Maurice, a chef who is extremely fond of eating. Also, make this a mystery
which revolves around the world of truffles and truffle-hunting. Finally, add a
couple of chapters written from the perspective of a pet pig. “Oh, boy,” you
might think, “Patrick’s finally gone insane. He’s seen one too many episodes of
the BBC’s Father Brown, and he’s snapped
and started to read cozy mysteries. Well, maybe we can at least finally get his
recipe for coffee cake.” But you’d be wrong – the recipe is my mother’s, and it
is not mine to give away. You’ll just have to settle for my opinion of the
book.
I first heard of this book because of an enthusiastic review
on In
Search of the Classic Mystery Novel. The plot involves the
disappearance of Chef Maurice’s mushroom supplier, Ollie Meadows. This is a
major inconvenience for the temperamental chef. So he breaks into Ollie’s home
to partake of his mushrooms, fully intending to pay of course. But he discovers
that he hasn’t been the only one to break into Ollie’s home, and then he finds
them: exquisite white Alba truffles… yet they have a distinct aroma of English
woods to them! Could they possibly be local
truffles? Chef Maurice decides that if Ollie was able to find the truffles, he
can too, and thus he adopts a pig named Hamilton. They go truffle-hunting, but
they turn up a corpse instead. And thus, the game is afoot, and Chef Maurice’s
inaugural mystery is underway!
