Barbara Else: The Case of the Missing Kitchen

Reviewed by SIOBHAN HARVEY

If you believe that arbiter of culinary style over substance, Nigella Lawson, the kitchen is the realm of any domestic goddess. Suzie Emmett, heroine of Barbara Else's new novel, The Case of the Missing Kitchen, might disagree. She'd equate the kitchen with extermination, not deification, with butchery and death not domesticity.

Suzie is a troubled soul who lives each moment on the edge of a crisis. She has two precocious children each by different fathers.

Though these men are unsettling examples of manhood, they have nothing on Suzie's current beau Caine. A tyrannical boy-in-blue, when Caine is not dragging his girlfriend to the morgue to identify mysterious bodies, he's following her every mishap, his police cohorts in tow.

Then there are Suzie's two sisters, Philippa and Lara. They also possess equally strange partners. With Philippa's apparent death and Lara's apparent disappearance, Suzie's life goes haywire. She finds a corpse in her kitchen, sees the men in her life collude against her and catches her brother-in-law in a compromising situation.

The only things to keep Suzie sane are her love for cooking and her job in a local cafe. But, as with all murder-mysteries, of course, nothing is quite what it seems.

A character like Suzie demands an energetic pace of writing. This is contrasted well by depictions of a sombre Wellington, an authentic backdrop for the machinations of serial-murderers.

This said, the novel is not without weakness. In fiction of this kind, where realism is discarded in favour of plot and action, readers need to suspend their disbelief to an exorbitant extent. Our credulity is stretched to breaking-point, for example, when - her children missing - Suzie turns her back on her lover and her family to take up with Gifford, a man whose own mother assures us must never be trusted.

Other inconsistencies relate to language. Though Suzie is a level-2 English graduate, her vocabulary is rife with words like uxorious and hypnagogic.

The climax also seems a bit too affected for its own good. Suzie returns to her kitchen for the slightest of reasons, a transparent device to achieve a final meeting between victim and villain.

But if you like your novels fevered and straightforward, this is the book for you. In spite of these criticisms, I spent much of the book laughing out loud. My advice: ignore the gauche orange and red cover, tuck in, enjoy.

Random House, $26.95

* Siobhan Harvey is an Auckland writer and tutor.