Culinary Assassin

Sabine Cross is very good at making people disappear. She is, it turns out, even better at duck. Eighteen months of patient, unglamorous work have made Sabine one of the top-ranked professional poisoners in the Fellowship of the Quiet Hand — and Nightshade, her deliberately forgettable Tuesday-night bistro, is supposed to be nothing more than the world's most boring cover story. Beige menu. Bad lighting. Six tables nobody remembers eating at. Then she can't quite bring herself to finish a job, a food blogger falls in love with her mushroom tart, and a queue starts forming around the block. Now Sabine is fielding a health inspector who adores her staff meal, a rival poisoner sizing her up over an uneaten dinner, a critic-impersonating saboteur with a very small vial, and a Fellowship handler running out of patience for a hitwoman who keeps letting her marks live because the reduction turned out well. Somewhere in the chaos there's also a regular by the window who just wants to know where she trained — and a granddaughter's christening she is absolutely not supposed to be catering. Sabine built a restaurant to hide a body count. She never planned for it to become the best thing in her life. A comic thriller for anyone who's ever wondered what happens when the person poisoning your entrée is having a genuine crisis about how good the sauce turned out.