To Die For - Softcover

Janet Neel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 014027054X ISBN 13: 9780140270549

Publisher: Penguin, 1999

Synopsis

At Cafe de la Paix, a fashionable Covent Garden restaurant, business is under threat and murder is on the menu...
Beautiful, spoilt Selina Marsh-Hayden and her childhood friend, plain and practical Judith Delves, have worked together to make their restaurant Cafe de la Paix a stunning success. So successful, in fact, that outside parties have begun to take an interest. Brian Rubin wants to buy them up to add to his own chain of restaurants, and Selina and her shareholders—her near-bankrupt husband Richard, Judith's lover Michael and debt-ridden chef Tony Gallagher—want to sell.
But Selina backs down mid-negotiations and deadlock is reached. Then she is found strangled, and it suddenly seems that Cafe de la Paix has become an asset worth killing for. There is no shortage of suspects, but DCS John McLeish and his strong-minded wife Francesca must investigate a fire, an attempted murder and evidence of financial and sexual indiscretions at the restaurant before the truth can finally be revealed.

About this title

About the Author

Janet Neel won the John Creasy Award for the British CrimeWriter's Association for her first novel, Death's Bright Angel, and subsequently has been short-listed twice for their Gold Dagger Award.

She lives in North London with her husband and their three children. She has had a varied career, working as a lawyer, a war games designer, a restaurateur, and an administrator in Britain's Department of Trade and Industry. She is now a Governor of the BBC, and a non-executive director of a bank, when not writing award-winning crime novels.

From Kirkus Reviews

Old friends Judith Delves and Selina Marsh-Hayden are managing partners in a pair of successful London restaurants. Other shareholders are Selinas husband Richard, his friend Michael Owens, now engaged to Judith, and head chef Tony Gallagher. All five had agreed to sell the business to Brian Rubin, head of Gemini Group. But now Selina has changed her minda fact that looms large when shes found, strangled, in an unused freezer in the larger restaurant, along with a bunch of letters indicating several ongoing extramarital affairs. The case falls to Detective Chief Superintendent John McLeish, whose wife Francesca is an old friend of Judiths. A short time later, a grease fire in the same restaurants kitchen temporarily shuts down the whole operation. Judith, some of the staff, a crew of carpenters, painters, and decorators are hard at work trying to re-open as quickly as possible when Tony Gallagher, on an amorous mission of his own, is knocked unconscious in the empty restaurant, and, soon after, another of the principals dies of a drug overdose. It looks like suicide (due to insufferable guilt?). But theres more to come before the means and motive behind all are revealed. Neel (A Timely Death, 19xx) writes with considerable skill and verve and with intriguing asides into the world of grand opera. All thats needed for the readers fullest enjoyment is a short course in the art of the deal. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 014027054X
• ISBN 13: 9780140270549
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240