Deadly Tasting

August 18, 2014
First published in France in 2005, this slight tale is the fourth Winemaker Detective mystery to appear Stateside (after Nightmare in Burgundy). Bordeaux resident and oenologist Benjamin Cooker is busy creating his latest wine guide when police inspector Barbaroux calls him to assist at a murder scene. Elderly Jules-Ernest Grémillion was savagely attacked, yet 11 empty wineglasses have been neatly arranged nearby and a 12th filled with what Cooker identifies as 1942 Chateau Pétrus. Soon a second elderly victim is discovered, this time near two glasses filled with the same rare vintage and 10 empty. The ritual promises more crimes to come, while the costly wine’s year and victims’ ages suggest that Bordeaux’s WWII history may be the key. Though its celebration of fine wine, food, and cigars charms, the book’s brevity, simplistic resolution, and lack of female characters won’t satisfy all palates.

November 1, 2014
Bon vivant Benjamin Cooker reappears to apply his encyclopedic knowledge of all things wine and food to flush out another murderer. Bordeaux police summon Cooker to the scene of a particularly barbaric murder. The inspector needs some specialized knowledge since the killer has left behind an arrangement of a dozen wine glasses with only one filled. Cooker identifies the red liquid as likely a Chteau P'trus from a 60-year-old vintage. Then another corpse appears, this one flanked by another 12 glasses but now two of them holding wine. With his eager assistant, Virgile, Cooker starts sleuthing, which leads back to some history most Bordelais would just as soon forget. As subtext in this detective story, the hero endures an arduous trial: insisting that Cooker lose some excess poundage, his wife puts him on a cabbage-soup diet, a regimen sure to offend a true gourmand.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)