Customer Reviews

Little Indiscretions: A Delectable Mystery

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A prize-winning mystery, Little Indiscretions, is based on the death of Nestor, a pastry chef who dies in a walk-in freezer that someone locks behind him. Why? Because Nestor knew secrets about just about every other character in the book. This is a very elegant, very European, very wonderful book. Recipes are included, but just as a good book doesn't answer all of a reader's questions, neither are the recipes complete enough to permit duplication. Damn.

This little gem is about as far from the cliche "spunky single mom investigates murder for no fathomable reason and falls in love with the cop, recipes/crosswords/knitting patterns included" fluffy frothy books as you can get. Not only is there no spunky single mom - there's no cop. Nor are there recipes. There's a lot of talk about recipes - but that's all.

Nevertheless, it passes all the tests. It's got the "Gee what happens next?" factor that keeps you turning pages. It has lovely writing (my compliments to the translator). It has non-cardboard characters whose lives are woven together in unexpected but believable ways. And if the ending isn't a tidy tying up with a big pink bow and a chocolate mint, well, life is like that.

A very unusual, elegant, highly entertaining, well crafted, funny, heart-tugging and shocking novel. Just wonderful.

the book starts with the death of a highly renowned pastry chef. then it goes to describe other characters, not even mentioning the death pf of the pastry chef. the description of the characters are very good, but they should be after most than 3/4 of the book are spent describing them. the murder isn't even discussed until the last 50 pages. and to me, the murder scenario, seemed like a let down.

Nestor Chaffino, a pointy-moustachioed pastry chef who was privy to too many secrets, found himself standing in the dark at 4:00 in the morning among the frozen carcasses in Ernesto Teldi's 1980-s model Westinghouse cool room, the door having swung shut behind him with a click and, oddly enough, a laugh. At twenty degrees below zero, Nestor didn't manage to live until morning, when a Häagen Dazs-seeking employee finally opened the door, but he did have time to come to an imperfect understanding of the circumstances of his death. The fortune teller he had seen two weeks before had given him enough information to figure out some of it.

In Little Indiscretions Carmen Posadas pieces together the coincidences and peccadilloes that surrounded Nestor's demise--not his own failings, as he was a discreet confidant, and a loyal friend, and he ran a clean kitchen, but those of his acquaintances: from his friend Carlos's love affair with a picturesque woman to the skeletons in the
Teldis' separate bedroom closets to the unwelcome longings of widower Serafin Tous.

Posadas's story is a good one, and the reader is eager, nearing the end, to discover which--if any--of the indiscretions uncovered in its course has culminated in Nestor's death by freezing. But I found the solution to Nestor's puzzle, the reason, finally, that the freezer door closed behind him, hard to believe. The story was also more difficult to follow than it might have been because the author tells it in disconnected chunks, going backward in time from Nestor's death, then forward, and incorporating memories of much older, yet still haunting, events.

Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece