Researching her new column, Chas Wheatley, a food writer with a taste for sleuthing, discovers sometning is rotten with Washington's most popular new restaurant. The head chef has gone missing, and not only is the food suffering, but no one can give her a straight answer as to his whereabouts.

It seems the chef isn't the only one who's mysteriously disappeared. Bodies begin surfacing around the nation's capital, confounding the police. But Chas has a few advantages the cops can't possibly match: a clever eye for detail, a love of good gossip, a talent for digging up the truth, and connections in the newspaper and culinary worlds.

Diving further into the ivestigation, Chas delves deep into the underbelly of the culinary business and onto a twisted trail of deceit, blackmail, and murder only she can solve--that is, if she lives long enough....

Amazon.com Review
Add to the burgeoning cohort of culinary-themed mysteries Phyllis Richman's Murder on the Gravy Train, which provides a second outing for her restaurant reviewer-sleuth, Chas (née Charlotte Sue) Wheatley.

Richman, the restaurant reviewer for The Washington Post, is ideally suited to supply a vivid glimpse of the terrain where big-city culinary and newspaper worlds intersect, and offers a tempting brew of the pleasures and politics of both. Added to the mix is a tale of blackmail, extortion, spying, corruption, and (let's not forget) murder--several times over.

When the chef at one of Washington's most popular new restaurants disappears, Wheatley's curiosity is piqued. No one is forthcoming about his whereabouts, and, almost worse, the restaurant's food, minus the chef, is terribly off. Wheatley takes it upon herself to track down the chef and discovers a widening pool of foul play. In her search, we learn about the illicit side of the restaurant business (readers will think twice about ordering bottled water when they dine out next), and the often-nasty machinations of newsroom life (spying and story thievery). We are also exposed to the bureaucratic yet gruesome grind of a typical homicide department (decayed bodies without ID, for example).

Richman's narrative reads like a semi-autobiographical roman à clef: culinary insiders, real and would-be, will delight in her up-front-and-personal food-world asides. In fact, anyone who enjoys food and foul play--a heady combination--should relish this tale of both, nicely spun out by an author of appetite and imagination. --Arthur Boehm