Knife Skills for Beginners, the first in a planned mystery series from food writer and Masterchef semifinalist Orlando Murrin, is smooth and delicious, but it won't be mistaken for the book-form equivalent of comfort food.
Narrator Paul Delamare, a London-based chef and food writer, is still reeling from the death of his boyfriend when he bails out an old friend: fallen celebrity chef Christian Wagner's arm is in a cast and he needs help teaching a residential cooking course. But Paul is as miffed as his eight students when Christian's quick cameo on day one turns out to be the full extent of his classroom participation. The morning after Paul chews out Christian for abandoning him, Paul enters his friend's flat at the cooking school and finds Christian "with his head hacked almost off." Driven into the table beside Christian's body is a cleaver that looks exactly like the one Paul used in class.
The cooking school becomes a crime scene and Paul a suspect in the murder investigation. Meanwhile, he plays detective: Why are some of his students behaving strangely? And did Christian really break his arm by, as he claimed, falling down an escalator? Readers may identify one plot device hiding in plain sight, but otherwise they should find the novel's central puzzle bedeviling. Throughout Knife Skills for Beginners, Paul is a droll and refreshingly quirk-free guide who takes time out to give readers his professional opinions, among them: "There's something aggressively heterosexual about a full English breakfast." --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer