Blowback (The Enzo Files, 5)

"CATNIP FOR ARMCHAIR SLEUTHS" --Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review




"ONE OF THE BEST MYSTERY WRITERS ON THE MARKET TODAY" --The Mystery Gazette




Continuing his string of investigations into stubborn cold cases, ex-forensics superstar Enzo Macleod takes the case, diving into the big business and high stakes of French haute cuisine.



Seven years ago, France's top chef, Marc Fraysse, summoned the world's culinary press to his remote restaurant in central France to make an announcement that he said would cause shockwaves in the culinary community.



Instead of an announcement, the reporters were shocked to find instead that the great chef had been murdered and they left without a clue about the message the chef intended to deliver or who might have killed him.

Winter has settled in around the mountaintop restaurant, causing complications, as Enzo learns more about the complex web of relationships that surrounded the celebrated (if also unpredictable) chef--a spurned lover, a jealous wife, an estranged brother, an embittered food critic...




Macleod begins to see parallels with his own life and loves. In diving into this new case, he finds himself reopening old wounds of his own.

Peter May was born and raised in Scotland. He was an award-winning journalist at the age of twenty-one and a published novelist at twenty-six. When his first book was adapted as a major drama series for the BBC, he quit journalism and during the high-octane fifteen years that followed, became one of Scotland's most successful television dramatists. He created three prime-time drama series, presided over two of the highest-rated serials in his homeland as script editor and producer, and worked on more than 1,000 episodes of ratings-topping drama before deciding to leave television to return to his first love, writing novels.

He has won several literature awards in France; received several English-language awards, including the Barry Award for The Blackhouse, the first volume in his internationally bestselling Lewis Trilogy; and in 2014 he won the ITV Specsavers Crime Thriller Book Club Best Read of the Year award for Entry Island. Peter now lives in southwest France with his wife, writer Janice Hally.