Crime Fraiche (Capucine Culinary Mystery)

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Alexander Campion

Product details Reading level: Kensington 24 June Language: Be the first to review this item Would you like to tell us about a lower price? Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a product review. Most helpful customer reviews on Amazon. I agree with most of the reviews below. The characters are 1 dimension stereotypes. The plot is shaky.

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The writing seems to be written by more than one person cut and paste? I'm not a prude but the sex scenes were pornograhic. Did not enjoy this book ,and I'm a fan of this genre. With this fifth book in his Capucine Le Tellier food-and-mystery series, Alexander Campion jumps the shark. Having outgrown or grown bored with the French restaurant scene, Campion sets his sites on international political intrigue. Capucine Le Tellier is a well-educated, high-ranking officer in the French police who solves crimes that have to do with food and chefs.

This time around, characters from previous books reappear for sentimental reasons; Capucine's restaurant-critic husband Alexandre is along for the ride to get restaurant reservations and do the cooking; her cousin Jacques of the French CIA a sort of tongue-in-cheek Mycroft character to Capucine's Sherlock Holmes does too much of the plot's heavy lifting, which is a lot of heavy lifting.

Best to stick with the first four books in this series particularly numbers 3 and 4, both excellent and live in hope that Campion will come back to this series with more focus and inspiration. This isn't the police procedural you were expecting.

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Cappucine Le Tellier accepts nothing at face value. Her food critic husband provides the separate thread: I love the way this tale starts as a telling of a simple cruise with friends and others. The most innocent of all the boat's passengers, the hired help, proves the catalyst. Keep your eye on her as the clues, wound together like colored threads in a sewing basket, begin to unravel and lead to the real crime. The sleight of hand, the changing positions of the characters, the subtle shifts There was a problem filtering reviews right now.

Please try again later. In Crime Fraiche, Alexander Campion takes his leading characters, detective and now police boss Capucine LeTellier, her restaurant critic husband Alexandre and several associates through not one but two mysteries.

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Though concentrating on three mysterious murders in the French countryside of Normandy, a series of bizarre thefts in Paris serves as counterpoint to Capucine's plunge into the lethal workings of a village farm where prize beef is raised, slaughtered and aged. So, if one expects the same landscape and environment so elegantly described in Campion's debut mystery novel, The Grave Gourmet, one is delighted instead by an equally rich description of a bucolic France with heritage and traditions that stretch back to the 16th century.

Again, the culinary arts are central both thematically and in the narrative itself, but this time it is largely country cooking and its contributions to high cuisine that fascinate. Campion's knowledge is again breathtaking, thorough and sweetly credible so that the reader can simply enjoy living in an unfamiliar world as though it was a trip back to one's own childhood, or to a former lifetime--should reincarnation be apt.

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Both the cultural erudition and the precise details of hunting mushrooms with caution, pheasants with shotguns and hares with ferret accomplices give the novel a non-fiction feel that is satisfying and strengthens the story in a way that perfectly balances the mouthwatering dishes Campion continually serves up. Beyond a well-deserved five stars, what's to be said of Crime Fraiche?

The police work is believable and convincing even when surprising; the food and wine are delicious; the characters with their sublimely human foibles stand out as real people; the plots develop smoothly and neatly; the paced and layered narrative, told in short pointed chapters, keeps you reading and neglecting all tedious activities as if you had a license and gun of your own.

Though Campion lets flow with a wide use of French terms, he never fails to include an English version, quite unobtrusively I might add so that the narrative never pauses yet achieves a marked French flavor. People who love great food, or France, or intriguing mysteries--or fine writing--will consider themselves lucky to have picked this book up, even if they can't put it down.

Now I'm looking forward to Killer Critique Kindle Edition Verified Purchase. Down in hot weather with a bad cold, I searched "culinary mystery" just for the heck of it and was surprised to find more than a hundred volumes in a genre I hadn't known existed. I chose Crime Fraiche, as much for the title as anything else, and another by the same author, Death of a Chef.

Culinary trumps mystery in these books, the food being their most entertaining and convincing feature, though I found the setting, the characters, and the situations amusing.

Crime Fraiche

As others have noted, the plots disappoint. Don't even try to figure out whodunnit. You can't know until you are told. I'm one of those people who want to know exactly what people are eating when an author has his characters dining at home or a restaurant.

Plus a really good plot helps too. I cannot believe I had to wait so long in life for someone to write a series where some deference is paid to the food. Not only that but the who-dunits are unique.

Just pick one of the series up. They're relatively short books. You'll be, I hope, pleasantly surprised as I was. Anyone who knows of other series like this one please comment to this review. One person found this helpful. Capucine and her food critic husband are such an unlikely couple and half the fun of this book is their interaction. I liked this book.

The characters are well drawn and the dialogue in keeping with the characters. In the background is the picture drawn of modern day France today. It is not a specially flattering one as France deals with the EU strictures on animal husbandry and other attacks on the traditional way of life. Despite this, game hunting and bird shooting appear to be alive and well amongst the "gentry" and the descriptions of a "shoot" and "hunt" are observed with humour and a sense of the ridiculous.

Death at the Chateau Bremont. A Room with a Pew. From Garden To Grave. The Scottie Barked At Midnight. Kale to the Queen. Life in the Dead Lane. Among the Lesser Gods. Death by Chocolate Lab. Death by Vanilla Latte.

Someone's Mad at the Hatter. Death on Windmill Way.

A Reference to Murder. The Antique House Murders. Leave It to Cleaver. For Whom the Bread Rolls. Fate of the Fallen. Fowl of the House of Usher. Double Fudge Brownie Murder. Saddle Up For Murder. Shots in the Dark. Mrs Hudson and the Malabar Rose. Lady Rample Steps Out. Cannoli to Die For.

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