Delicious

When the greedy owner of a Las Vegas movie catering company tries to muscle in on a local, family-owned business in Honolulu, it leaves a very bad taste in the mouths of the natives, and the battle for paradise begins for Joseph, a young Hawaiian chef. As far as Joseph's father Sid is concerned, this is an invasion on par with Captain Cook and the mainlanders have to be stopped at all costs. As Joseph defends his family he encounters a TV producer rebounding from a bad breakup and suffering from an unrelenting chemically induced erection, the producer's androgynous New Age-y assistant, and a trash-talking lap-dance-addicted stroke survivor. Adding to this frenetic luau is Joseph's old-school Polynesian uncle, his bodybuilder cousin, and his politically correct, retro-Hawaiian girlfriend. With the lines drawn and the locals breathing fire down their necks, the Sin City boys decide to enlist the services of an ecstasy-popping ex-Marine hit man. Then things go horribly wrong-or, depending on how you look at it, just right. Mark Haskell Smith's Delicious is an uproarious, delectably dark mystery that offers a take on Hawaii that definitely hasn't been endorsed by the tourist bureau. "Delicious is engrossing from page one. This is a deft and wild comic novel drawn from utterly fresh material. I look forward to anything Mark Haskell Smith writes." -Jim Harrison "Haskell Smith writes well, especially about sex and food, and the multilayered plots move so fast they feel fresh. Think Elmore Leonard meets Mario Batali." -Richard Rayner, Los Angeles Times "Rated NC-17 for intermittent comic violence, good-natured swearing, cannibalism, humorous amorality, and some truly perverse sex." -Kirkus Reviews "Hits exactly the right spot. . . . Haskell Smith smartly keeps the action lively by cutting back and forth between viewpoints while tossing off hilarious one-liners and situations that would be over-the-top if they weren't so hilarious. But what really makes this novel work is its deft touch with serious themes of displacement and relationship changes. Deliciousis not for those with weak stomachs, prudish minds or delicate ears, but that leaves the rest of us to savor the novel's many twisted charms." -Baltimore Sun "Smith writes like Carl Hiaasen's oversexed cousin. . . . [He] excels at cooking up a supremely weird atmosphere and spicing it up with equally weird sex and violence." -Booklist "At once sexy and repulsive, the novel manages to plant sharp moral and cultural barbs in its gorge-feast of a plot." -Publishers Weekly "Perverse black humor and sensuality, totally unexpected situations. Murder and gore abound but are presented so matter-of-factly, with such sly, lazy humor, that they are not repellent. . . . This is spare, stylish writing. Not a wasted word. . . . Believe me, Smith makes sure the reader has an immediate connection to each character. There's no stopping after the first couple of pages. Smith wittily displays an intuitive sense of human nature; how variable, vulnerable, changeable and dangerous the mind of man (and woman) is. Some of the plot turns are simply breathtaking. But unlike other twisty thrillers, you're never confused or exasperated. You go right along with Smith, and accept what he decides is the fate of this or that one." -Liz Smith, New York Post