Him by insinuation, by lies, by ! chicanery, stole it. In New York was distinguished by his presence as chef de cuisine? You know that Lazio stole the position from Sffair of no reputation called the Willow Cub in a town by the name of Boston? You know that for years your Hotel Churchill Knee…As you no doubt know, your friend Vuckcic married her, and Lazio stole her He was elected to Les Quinze Maitres in 1927 in spite of my violentĭomenico Rossi of the Empire Café in London I have held her many times on this In 1920 from my friend Zelota of Tarragona and claimed the creation. He stole the secrets of Rognons aux Montagnes Fortunately, there's a master sleuth and his trusty aide around to sort everything out.Īs a bonus, the recipes for a lot of the dishes described in this mystery are included in the back! I've always wanted to try the dishes Fritz Brenner (Wolfe's resident cook) concocts, and The Nero Wolfe Cookbookis on my Christmas list, but until the day I get that, I might just try out one of the recipes included in this book.Cut into small pieces and fed to pigs!-But n, that would render the hams One of the chefs is killed, and several of the others had expressed their malice toward him before he died, including Wolfe's particular friend Marko Vukcic, whose ex-wife was married to the deceased. Poor Archie Goodwin - if you've read any of these books or seen the TV series based on them, you know he's not along because he's expecting to have fun.īut they do get to West Virginia with no actual mishaps, and once settled there, of course the murder and mayhem commence. Which means he has to not only leave his Manhattan brownstone, he has travel on a train. Wolfe is the guest of honor at a meeting of a group of world-renowned chefs at a resort in West Virginia. Surely I read that omnibus (two novels and a trio of short stories) back when I first discovered Rex Stout? But I didn't actually remember any of it while reading, so maybe I just never actually cracked this book, always saving it for when I ran out of library books or something? 'Tis a puzzlement.Īt any rate, this is a jolly good mystery. I thought I'd read this one before, as it's in a Nero Wolfe omnibus I found in my parents' basement a couple weeks ago. In other words, precisely what I needed to bring me out of the everything-is-meaningless-and-grasping-for-the-wind funk I was in after This Side of Paradise. The dialog sparkles, the plots dazzle, the characters-of-the-day amuse, and the regular characters delight.

Too Many Cooks by Rex Stout