A BITTER FEAST Redux and a Little Armchair Travel

DEBORAH CROMBIE: A BITTER FEAST, the 18th Superintendent Duncan Kincaid/Inspector Gemma James novel is out in paperback today!!

And never have I wished more for a little bit of magic to transport me to another time and place! When the book came out in hardcover last autumn, I was already missing the Cotswolds. This part of England, encompassing parts of Oxfordshire, Warwickshire, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, and Worcestershire (like the sauce), was one of the first places I ever visited in the UK, and those green rolling hills and golden villages cemented my lifelong love of everything English. The Cotswolds are idyllic, they are the Shire, they are "the green and pleasant land" of Blake's Jerusalem.

And the Cotswolds also seemed like the perfect place to set a mystery. But first I had to find the perfect village! This took me one research trip, then I had to go back twice more to really immerse myself. 

What a sacrifice that was! Not.

On that first trip, I chose a village I remembered from that very first Cotswold visit with my parents, Lower Slaughter. How could I resist the name? And there's an Upper Slaughter, too. The name doesn't mean what you might think, however, but is derived from "slough", referring to wetlands. The River Eye, a tributary to the Windrush, runs through the center of the village. (And aren't those names right out of The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings?)

So, if a year ago I was already pining for that green and pleasant land, it at least seemed within reach, a plane ticket away. I could imagine having afternoon tea at the fabulous Slaughters Manor House in Lower Slaughter. (Drooling...)

Or having a drink in the cozy bar of the Red Lion Inn in Long Compton. (One of my favorite pubs anywhere.)

Or walking through a beautiful English garden.

Now that all seems like a dream!

What to do??

Open the pages of the book, of course, and transport myself. I think we need a better phrase than "armchair travel," because that sounds so dull compared to the magic of visiting another place and time through a book. Suggestions, anyone?

And, REDS and readers, what favorite place would you revisit, if you could wave your magic wand?

In the meantime, you can travel with Duncan and Gemma to Lower Slaughter on a beautiful autumn weekend, eat amazing food, smell the English roses, and even try some Cotswold Dry Gin!

Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid and his wife Detective Inspector Gemma James have been looking forward to a relaxing weekend getaway in the beautiful Cotswolds. But after a tragic accident and unexplained deaths, things in the country take a deadly turn…

Duncan, Gemma, their children, and their friend Doug Cullen are guests at Beck House, the family estate belonging to Melody Talbot, Gemma’s trusted detective sergeant, in the picturesque village of Lower Slaughter.  The centerpiece of the weekend is a posh charity luncheon catered by rising local chef Viv Holland, a Glouscestershire native freshly returned from London. Attended by elites and critics, the event could make Viv a culinary star. But when things go terribly wrong, the detectives are pulled into the investigation, and each new piece of information makes it clear that the killer has a connection with Viv’s pub—or, perhaps, with Beck House itself.

New York Times bestselling author Deborah Crombie is a native Texan who writes crime novels set in the United Kingdom. Her Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James series has received numerous awards, including Edgar, Macavity, and Agatha nominations, and is published in more than a dozen countries to international acclaim.

Crombie lives in North Texas with her husband, German shepherds, and cats, and divides her time between Texas and Great Britain. Her latest novel, A Bitter Feast, is now available from William Morrow in paperback.  She is currently working on her nineteenth Kincaid/James novel.

 

Deborah Crombie's A Bitter Feast is here!

LUCY BURDETTE: Today our dear Deborah Crombie's book A BITTER FEAST is on sale everywhere! We couldn't be more excited! Rather than wax on about how much we loved this book and this author, I'll get right to questions for Deb:

I know well how hard writing is and especially writing a complicated police procedural with long running characters. But I kept thinking about how much fun you must have had with the background of the story – inventing the food and the gardens and the dogs and describing Melody’s parents’ country home. And at the lunch, the table settings, the local produce, the gin cocktails…

Do you mind starting with the lunch menu? That special luncheon was so divine! I really hoped that the murder wouldn’t ruin the meal before the guests got a chance to enjoy it. Roasted lamb with white beans and fennel, local smoked trout pate, pickled veggies with seeded flat bread—you had me absolutely drooling. Even the salad was stunning with pears, blue cheese and a drizzle of caramel. 

 But now inquiring minds need to know, did you actually cook this menu? And how did you choose it?

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I wish I had cooked all of those things! I’m hungry just reading your list.

I’ve made leg of lamb, although not in a smoker, and fennel and white beans, although not together with the lamb. And I’ve experimented quite a bit with the fermented veggies. (As for the gin cocktails, I think I can claim to be an expert!)

The main inspiration for Viv’s menu was a dinner given by a local McKinney chef, Robert Lyford.  It was my first trip to the Round Top Antiques week down in Brenham, Texas, and Robert was the featured chef for an outdoor dinner at a place called Rancho Pillow.  The guests were seated at one long table, set much like the tables in the book. We were served pickled vegetables and spicy pimento cheese with crispbread, then Robert’s main course was “pork and beans” served in camping tins.  And the deserts were in little jars, as are Viv’s in the book. All the food was amazing. So that part of the menu is totally down to Rob, except that I switched pork to lamb because the Cotswolds is sheep country. The pears and blue cheese were based on a recipe in our local foodie magazine, Edible. Yum! The smoked trout I just threw in because I love smoked trout spread, and if fit with the local foods.

LUCY: You had wonderful descriptions of your character Viv deciding she’d be a chef and then what it was like in the world of the kitchen, the sexism, the hard work, the pressure of seeking a Michelin star—even the tattoos the chefs got to celebrate. Here’s a snippet from p. 270: “It was so tenuous and indefinable, the synergy of the kitchen. When everything worked, it was an almost liquid thing—one station flowed smoothly into another and the communication on the line was seamless.” (Of course, everything is not working!)

Tell us about the research you did to get this right?

DEB: I had lots of help and advice, not just from Rob Lyford, but from my chef friend in Phoenix, Sean Currid, and chef Nik Chappell at the Slaughters Manor House in Lower Slaughter. Both Sean and Nik gave me restaurant kitchen tours and answered lots of questions. And then I read and read and read. Chefs’ bios and memoirs, books about professional cooking and about the restaurant world. I also ate a lot! Research was my excuse to go to a lot of restaurants in London and the Cotswolds that I would normally have considered out of my budget. Now I have to figure out a way to justify those meals on the next trip.

LUCY: I’ve been thinking a lot about your chef characters and remembered an interview I did on the blog with psychologist Scott Haas about his book, THE BACK OF THE HOUSE. I asked him if he ever felt like a psychologist to the chefs, and he said:

“There is a profound superficiality to the way some chefs regard the depth of their emotional lives--an avoidance, a calcification, part of why they cook instead of developing intimacy.  Cooking is much easier than working on relationships.  Certainly the chef told me extremely personal things, but this is not an introspective profession. On the contrary.”

Did you find this to be true as you were talking with chefs? I can imagine this description fitting at least one of your characters…

DEB: The chefs I spoke to seemed to make a great effort to lead balanced lives, and they guard their days off ferociously. But, yes, I think you can safely say that the chefs in my book have a hard time maintaining a work/life balance. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have much of a story!

LUCY: You make a wonderful comparison between the work of a gardener and a chef—how in both professions, people work so hard to achieve something that is fleeting, such as a wonderful meal or a perfectly weeded garden. And that brings us to gardens. We can picture the roses and the hedges and can imagine the landscape architect at work. Will you tell us about your interest in this and how your gardens compare?

DEB: This book let me indulge both my passions. I am an enthusiastic if not particularly good gardener (the same could probably be said of my cooking…) and I have an obsession with English roses. I’ve also been fascinated for as long as I can remember with English gardens, and with Arts and Crafts gardens in particular.  A wonderful book on the restoration of the Gertrude Jekyll garden at a Surrey house called Upton Grey inspired the gardens at Beck House.  I even drew diagrams of all the beds and plantings.  Although my own garden is tiny in scale compared to something like Beck House, I do use a lot of native perennials in a natural way—a very Arts and Crafts design template.

LUCY: You were spinning so many plates with your plots and subplots and it surely must’ve been difficult to decide which characters to bring forward and which new ones to introduce. With a series that has run to 18 books, can you tell us more about that process?

DEB: I’m usually thinking a book ahead about what characters will lead the next story. In A Bitter Feast, I knew I wanted all four of my main characters, Doug and Melody as well as Duncan and Gemma, to be working the same case in the same place, and the setting followed from that. But because there is such a big cast of continuing characters in the series, my biggest problem in planning a book is deciding who to leave out, rather than who to put in.  And sometimes the characters don’t cooperate.

LUCY: You’ve mentioned that you go to England most years to do research for your books. What did you do and see while planning A BITTER FEAST? (Now we’re all dying to visit the Cotswolds.) Do you know what you’re looking for before you go? And where are we headed next?

DEB: I visited the Cotswolds on my very first trip to England with my parents, in the late seventies, and I had never been back, although I had for a long time thought the area would make a great setting for a novel. I made three trips for this book. The first was sort of a fact-finding mission, trying to find the perfect village (or villages) for the story. On that visit, I decided on the Slaughters, which I’d seen all those years ago with my folks. I’m sure we even stayed at Lords of the Manor in Upper Slaughter, when it had just opened as a country house hotel.

On the second and third trips I stayed in both Lower and Upper Slaughter, and I do think I could work for the Slaughters tourist bureau! The landscape and the villages in this part of England are just breathtakingly beautiful.  I’m quite downcast now at not having an excuse to go back—but maybe I will think of one. Beck House and the Lamb are, after all, still there.

The next book, however, is set in London, in Bloomsbury and Soho, and I’ll be off for three weeks writing and researching in London right after Bouchercon! And as usual, I can’t wait!

LUCY: Readers, do you know that all 7 of the Jungle Reds will be at Bouchercon in Dallas in a couple of weeks? Two of our Reds are Guests of Honor--Debs and Hank! Don't miss the annual Jungle Red game show on Thursday the 31st at 2:30. 

And I have the honor of interviewing Debs on Thursday morning at 9:30. What questions would you like me to ask???

And most important, you can buy A BITTER FEAST wherever books are sold...

Debs Gearing up for A BITTER FEAST

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Oh my gosh, we have a lot going on at Jungle Red these days. Lucy's newest Key West mystery was out in May, new books from Hallie and Rhys are coming next week, then Hank later in August, Jenn in September, me in October, and Julia in April! It's a fabulous REDS season!! And we are all in some stage or another of promoting these books and writing the next one (or "ones" in Jenn's case!)

Here's where we are on A BITTER FEAST, Kincaid/James #18, coming October 8th!

Here's the first review, and it's STARRED! I am over the moon!

*A Bitter Feast.

By Deborah Crombie
Oct. 2019. 384p. Morrow, $25.99 (9780062271662); e-book, $12.99 (9780062271686)

A weekend in the country turns into more work than play for Scotland Yard detectives Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James. Melody Talbot, Gemma’s detective sergeant, invites the couple and their three children to the Cotswolds estate of her parents, Sir Ivan and Lady Adelaide Talbot, on the occasion of an upscale charity luncheon to be catered by local chef Viv Holland. Things go awry from the start when Duncan, traveling to the Talbots’ alone in the family car, is hit broadside, and the other driver dies as the slightly injured Duncan holds her hand. But attention centers on the passenger in that car, identified as former London celebrity chef Fergus O’Reilly, who’s found to have died before the crash. So, what was intended to be a relaxing sojourn turns into a murder investigation. As the detectives pitch in to help at the luncheon and confer with local authorities, another person close to Viv becomes a victim, and the history between the chefs is gradually revealed. The eighteenth entry in this best-selling series is notable for its portrayals of Duncan and Gemma’s children (especially the oldest, Kit), and for the addition of food as an item of interest, a factor that will extend the appeal from the series' procedural-loving fan base to the foodie mystery crowd. This character-driven series just continues to get better.

—Michele Leber


It is so incredibly nerve-wracking, as we can all attest, waiting for the reviews to come out.

The social media banner are up, yay!  Here's the one for Facebook.

This one was quite a trauma, I can tell you, as the first pass from the publisher was BROWN. All over. Background and cover. I had a good bit of help from my painter sister-in-law, and together we came up with the red overlay behind the gold cover. What do you think? Hopefully it's much more eye-catching.

Today I'm meeting with my publicist at Morrow to talk about the tour schedule, so more on that soon.

Next week, I tackle updating my web page. And maybe (whispering) even contemplating a newsletter. 

So what am I actually writing, you ask?

Seven hundred and sixty of these. These are called tip-in sheets, and they will go in specially bound books for Barnes and Noble. I've done these for independent bookstores before, but never nearly as many, and never for B&N, so I'm pretty tickled. (But boy do I have writer's cramp.)

And there is terrific news coming soon about Duncan and Gemma's next adventures, so stay tuned!

Readers, how important is it to you to have a signed copy of a favorite author's book? I'm not a big collector, but I have a few I will never part with, like my signed Dick Francis and James Herriott books.

Tell us about your most precious signed book, and I'll send one of the very last ARCs of A BITTER FEAST to one lucky commenter!

And just for one more bit of fun, here's Castle Coombe, the beautiful village in the book jacket photo. Anyone who has been there will recognize it instantly. It makes me want to go back to the Cotswolds!

Deborah Crombie--A Bitter Feast, the Cover

DEBORAH CROMBIE: One of THE most exciting things for an author in the life of a book is the day you get to show the world the cover! So here is the first look at A BITTER FEAST, Kincaid/James #18!

I absolutely love it!  I think it perfectly conveys the beautiful but ever so slightly sinister feeling of my Cotswold village in the story.  The wash over the artwork is a shimmery metallic gold and I think it's going to leap off the book displays. I hope you like it, too!

Here's a bit about the story:

Scotland Yard Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid and his wife, Detective Inspector Gemma James, have been invited for a relaxing weekend in the tranquil Cotswolds, one of Britain’s most beautiful and historic regions, famous for its rolling hills, sheep-strewn green meadows, golden cottages, and timeless villages that retain the spirit of old England. 

Duncan, Gemma, and their children are guests at Beck House, the country estate belonging to the family of Melody Talbot, Gemma’s trusted detective sergeant. No ordinary farmers, the Talbots are wealthy and prominent with ties to Britain’s most powerful and influential. A centerpiece of this glorious fall getaway is a posh charity luncheon catered by up-and-coming chef Viv Holland. After more than a decade in London, Viv has returned to her native Glouscestershire, making a name for herself with her innovative, mouthwatering use of the local bounty. Attended by several dozen of the area’s well-to-do, as well as national food bloggers and restaurant critics, the event could make Viv a star. 

But a tragic car accident followed by a series of mysterious deaths could ruin her ascent. Each piece of information that surfaces makes it clear that the killer had a connection with Viv’s pub—and perhaps with Beck House itself. 

Does the truth lie in the past? Or is it more immediate, woven into the tangled relationships and bitter resentments swirling among the staff at Beck House and at Viv’s pub? Or is it even more personal, entwined with secrets hidden by Viv, her business partner Bea Abbot, and Viv’s eleven-year-old daughter Grace?

Further revelations rock the Talbots’ estate and pull Duncan and Gemma and their colleagues into the investigation. With so much at stake both personally and professionally, especially for Melody Talbot, finding the killer becomes one of the team’s most crucial cases.

I hope REDS and readers are looking forward to the release of A BITTER FEAST on October 8th, 2019 as much as I am!

It's available for PRE-ORDER here:

Amazon 

Barnes and Noble 

iBooks 

IndieBound

Harper Collins  
Books-a-Million

Kobo

Google Play
 
So, dear REDS and readers, do you like a book cover to convey something about the story, such as setting? Will you pick up a book by an unfamiliar author simply because the cover intrigues you? (I most definitely will.) And how much does the cover influence your online picks?  

The New Kincaid/James--A BITTER FEAST

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I'm so excited to get to talk about the new Kincaid/James book today! This is #18 in the series, and it's called A BITTER FEAST. 

We don't quite have a finished cover, but it's coming soon and it is going to be stunning! In the meantime, here's a look at the very picturesque village of Lower Slaughter, in Gloucestershire, where most of the book takes place.

I had long wanted to set a book in the beautiful Cotswolds, one of my favorite parts of England. And after the London setting of the last two books, I thought it would be fun for all four of my series detectives, Scotland Yard Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid and Detective Inspector Gemma James (who are married, if you don't know) Detective Sergeant Doug Cullen, and Detective Sergeant Melody Talbot, to spend a weekend together in the country. They, and Duncan's and Gemma's three children, are invited to Melody Talbot's parents' home in the scenic Cotswold village of Lower Slaughter, where Melody's mother is hosting an autumn harvest charity luncheon catered by local chef Viv Holland. 

But of course from the very beginning, their relaxing weekend does not go as planned. 

Here's a snippet from the end of Chapter 1. Just to put you in the scene, Gemma and Melody have driven ahead with little Charlotte, and Doug is coming by train with the two boys the next morning, so Duncan is driving alone, and running late, as the September sun sets.

Kincaid’s predictions turned out to have been overly optimistic. The traffic had slowed again, and it was fully dark by the time he finally left the motorway. The car was too old to have built-in sat-nav, and not wanting to stop to check his mobile, he trusted to his memory of the map he’d looked at earlier. He decided not to ring Gemma as he didn’t know how long the remainder of the journey would take.

As he passed Cirencester, the land began to rise into the Cotswold Hills, as well as he could tell in the dark. Not far to go, then, but he had to laugh at the idea of the Talbots referring to their place as a “weekend” home. Perhaps they knew a way to circumvent the motorway traffic—or they simply took the train to the nearest station, where they had a retainer waiting to fetch them. Or maybe they just took a helicopter, he thought, grinning.

A signpost loomed in the headlamps. It was the turn off for Bourton-on-the-Water, the nearest small town to the Talbots’ village. Almost there, then. He was wondering if he should find a place to pull over and check the map on his mobile when headlamps blazed suddenly from his left, blinding him.

Before he could throw up a hand or hit the brake, there came a tearing impact, and all went dark. 

I hope you can't wait to find out what happens next. The book will be out in October 2019. You can pre-order the Kindle version here, and I'm sure the other e-book formats and hardcover pre-orders will go up soon, too.

This is a "busman's holiday" story--there are certainly suspicious deaths, but none of the series detectives are officially on the case. You can be sure that doesn't keep them from investigating, however!

Readers, do you have a favorite "busman's holiday" mystery? I've written several of them myself, but I think one of my faves would have to be Dorothy Sayer's "Busman's Honeymoon," with Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane.