In the Kitchen

This "mesmerizing" (Entertainment Weekly) novel from Booker Prize-shortlisted author Monica Ali brings us into the vivid world of a London restaurant. Gabriel Lightfoot, an enterprising man from a northern English mill town, is making good in London. As executive chef at the once-splendid Imperial Hotel, he aims to run a tight kitchen. Though he’s under constant challenge from the competing demands of an exuberantly multinational staff, a gimlet-eyed hotel management, and business partners with whom he is secretly planning a move to a restaurant of his own, all Gabe’s hard work looks set to pay off. Until, that is, a worker is found dead in the kitchen’s basement. It is a small death, a lonely death—but it is enough to disturb the tenuous balance of Gabe’s life. Enter Lena, an eerily attractive young woman with mysterious ties to the dead