French Toast
An inventive and personable young Paris chef, Freddy Perrin, is declared the winner of “Cuisine Idol,” a high-profile televised cook-off show. His prize as winner: the show’s sponsor, Rabelais Foods, will finance him to launch the restaurant of his dreams.
Melody Layne, an American ghost writer, came to Paris six months ago to write a memoir for a famous French actor. Though the actor was murdered before the project could get off the ground, his son Carlos hired her to write a biography of his father. Melody and Carlos fell in love, but she broke up with him when she concluded he’d misled her about his motivations.
Sales of the book continue, fueled by ongoing media coverage of the case, but that isn’t enough to support Melody’s life in Paris; she’s due to return home to New York in two weeks.
Then her foodie friend Jenna proposes a new project: they can collaborate on a cookbook featuring Freddy Perrin’s recipes, financed by Rabelais. Melody will write about his life, while Jenna will test and write up the recipes and arrange for glossy photographs of each dish. The book will promote the new restaurant and will be a manifesto of Freddy’s culinary approach. (He loves to mix incongruous ingredients, producing dishes like “trout with maple syrup” or “peach-liver tarts”.)
Jenna thinks Melody should be dating her cousin Michel instead of Carlos. Michel seems interested, and Melody likes him. But she can’t stop thinking about Carlos, and when she receives an invitation to a celebrity wedding, addressed to her and Carlos — the hosts apparently don’t realize they’ve broken up — she decides to accept, hoping that seeing him again will enable her to get closure on her feelings.
Meanwhile, to research her profile of Freddy, she’s interviewing people: his past employers, other chefs, and students who attended the cordon bleu school with him.
“Everybody loves Freddy” is the mantra, though there may be some doubt about that. When people get sick after a trial dinner at Freddy’s new restaurant, and a subsequent important dinner for influential diners proves disastrous, it seems someone is out to sabotage the new venture.
The story continues, taking us on an imagined culinary tour of Paris and other locations, while revealing an intriguing set of motivations, suspicions and plot twists, along with the details of Melody’s unfolding love life — all with LaBalme’s signature pithy writing and breezy tone, which make it great fun to read.
This novel is the second in LaBalme’s Paris Ghost Writer Chronicles, a series that began with French Ghost, published in 2022. Though each book can be read as a standalone, there’s an overall story arc to the series. French Toast concludes with a sneak peek at the first chapter of French Post, the third volume of the trilogy, which is still in the works.
In between these books, LaBalme published Summer People, a romance set in Cape Cod. She has also been venturing into other genres, with a paranormal/magical realism novel and a YA book in French, both still awaiting publication.
Her ability to “take us there” in France is based on her real-life experience. After starting her career in the New York fashion industry, LaBalme moved to Paris where she became Fashion Editor for the English language magazine Passion. She subsequently wrote and edited the gourmet destination guide La Belle France for fifteen years, while freelancing for the New York Times travel section and other publications.
She continues to love living and writing in Paris.
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