Description
A thrilling modern gothic novel, where the culinary horror of The Menu meets the dark fairytale atmosphere of Alix E. Harrow’s Starling House. She’s a chef like no other—and his house is hungry. Vietnamese-American chef Bernadette Quan wields a dangerous gift: anyone who eats her food unwittingly gives her one of their darkest secrets. It’s a curse that all but bars her from her struggling immigrant family’s home, where magic is not welcome. Until millionaire Walter Allard offers her a small fortune to cook for a retreat at his French colonial villa in Vietnam, and Bernadette sees her chance to change everything. All she has to do is extract a few secrets from Allard’s guests, and she can end the Quan’s financial worries—and maybe even win back her place in the family. However, she arrives to find the villa’s silent halls smelling of decay, the poison garden around it thriving, and the nearby townspeople whispering of a foreign evil whose presence still echoes through the region nearly a century after colonialism ended. And as Allard’s guests vanish one by one, Bernadette wonders whether she has the stomach for his kind of hospitality. But she soon realizes she's not the first Quan to cross paths with Allard—and the recipes of her ancestors might be her only weapon against him, his house, and their monstrous appetites.