Best Food Writing 2008 once more authoritatively and appealingly assembles the finest culinary prose from the past year’s books, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, and Web sites. This anthology features both established food writers and rising stars addressing everything from celebrated chefs to the travails of the home cook, and from erudite culinary history to food-inspired memoirs. By turns opinionated, evocative, nostalgic, sensuous, and just plain funny, it’s a tasty sampler to dip into time and again, whether you’re in the mood for foie gras or fruitcake.
Sophie Armitage has never felt attractive to men. Even her late husband treated her more as a companion than a lover. But suddenly a longtime friendship turns into an irresistibly passionate affair...
On a beautiful night in a second-tier American city, a beautiful astrophysicist with the clichéd everything to live for shoots herself dead with a .22. Tough-talking detective Mike Hoolihan, quickly summoned to the scene, has witnessed every sort of victim: "Jumpers, stumpers, dumpers, dunkers, bleeders, floaters, poppers, bursters." But this case is different. Mike has known the young woman for years--she's the daughter, it turns out, of Mike's mentor, Colonel Tom Rockwell. And the colonel is desperate to find a perp, despite massive evidence to the contrary.
Returning to L'Escala, the idyllic Spanish village where they were once so happy, Oz Blackstone and Primavera Phillips are looking to forget the past, but old ghosts are not so easy to placate, and the shade of Oz's childhood sweetheart Jan, now tragically dead, is threatening to turn their relationship into a seething cauldron of recrimination. Until a body turns up face down in the swimming pool of their new villa, and suddenly they are very much back in harness again. Faced with the indifference of the local police, Oz and Prim are forced to investigate themselves...
