The Grave Gourmet Book

You're a New Yorker. How is it you write about Paris?

I had a kind of complicated childhood. It's true I was born in New York. My parents were Brazilian diplomats and we spoke Portuguese at home and we'd go to Brazil all the time. The way it worked out, I didn't feel at home in New York or Rio. So when I started working I jumped at the chance of a transfer to Paris and never really came back. As far as I'm concerned, home is really Paris.

And why do you think you know so much about restaurants?

For most of my career I was either a management consultant or an investment banker. Those are jobs that take you to three-start restaurants pretty frequently. Also, you're on the road a tremendous amount and have to eat on your own, so you wind up paying a lot of attention to what you put in your mouth. After a while I started writing food review articles and became known as a critic. Once that happens you're in the kitchen and behind the scenes all the time and wind up with a very professional eye.

Alexandre is a lot like you. How come your protagonist is Capucine and not him?

Capucine has been in my head a long time. Probably because the notion of an iron-fist-in-a-Dior-velvet-glove female cop has always had a lot of appeal for me. Capucine and Alexandre are each other's Watsons. It's a great advantage when you write a book to have someone hanging around whom the characters need to explain stuff to. That way you don't have to keep trotting out that infinitely obnoxious omniscient narrator. When you get right down to it, I think of the book as the first of the "Capucine and Alexandre" series.

Why is Capucine so uncomfortable in her skin?

She's a rebel at heart. She was very ill at ease in her parents well-to-do bourgeois life and desperate to get her hands dirty in police work. Of course she's not about to give up her Chanel outfits, either. Her frustration is that she can never meld her two worlds. They are always warring with each other. Her problem is that each of them is equally important to her.

How can a man write credibly about a woman?

You know, all authors are androgynous at heart. After all, we have to populate our books with both sexes. In my case, I grew up in a strongly matriarchal family, married into a matriarchal family, and then went on to have three daughters. So, maybe unrealistically, I think I have a fairly good idea of how the female mind works.

Your knowledge of police procedures seems pretty hands-on. How is that? Were you ever arrested?

As a matter of fact, I was once. I had been convoked by a juge d'instruction—an investigative magistrate—to give evidence on a financial case and somehow mislaid the convocation summons. She sent the Police Judiciaire to get me. The three brigadiers who showed up at my apartment at six thirty that morning walked into The Grave Gourmet a few years later. Well, not exactly; the real life Isabelle was really extremely pretty.

I also worked for an American firm in France that had a very extensive security operation staffed largely with retired police officers. I got to know a retired PJ lieutenant pretty well and learned a great deal about their procedures.

Are all the restaurants in The Grave Gourmet real places that you've been to?

They're really composites. Even though the kitchens and the way the staffs interact are as authentic as I can make them, the restaurants themselves are mixes of different Paris three-star spots. The dishes are also composites but are just as complex as the way real three-star food is made.

Are there going to be more Capucine books?

Of course. The second one will be coming out in the spring of 2011 at the same time as the paperback edition of The Grave Gourmet. In that book, Capucine is taking some vacation in her uncle's château and a bunch of people from the village get bumped off. Meanwhile back in Paris she's handed a very tough case involving a woman who faints in open air markets and then steals priceless antiques from the people who take her in.

Capucine is as torn as ever. Her boss wants her back in Paris to work on that case. Her family wants her to stay at the château to solve the case in the village. If Alexandre weren't there to calm her down, she'd be in a bad way.

And I'm just finishing the third book. That one's about a serial killer who sets out to knock off the cream of Paris's restaurant critics. Capucine has a very hard time figuring out what's going on and by the time the fourth critic is killed she's getting really very worried that Alexandre might be next on the list.

And after that? Will you ever write anything but Capucine thrillers?

Way back in the pipeline there are two non-Capucine books. One is a historical thriller about an unsolved case that happened at the tail end of the Dreyfus Affair. The book requires an enormous amount of research and is more of a hobby at this point than a work poised to be in progress. The other is a story—a thriller really—takes place ten or fifteen years in the future. By the time I get to it, I'm sure it will have taken place in the past.

But these two take a back seat to the fourth Capucine story. See, one of Capucine's friends buys this magnificent Louis Vuiton steamer trunk at the Marché au Puces—the Paris flea market. She wants to turn it into a bar. But when it gets delivered there's this body inside. So then...

Publishers Weekly

Campion's debut introduces a beguiling heroine, 28-year-old Lt. Capucine Le Tellier of the Paris judicial police. Bored with her deskbound job pursuing white-collar crime, Capucine jumps at the chance to get involved in a possible murder investigation. The body of Jean-Louis Delage, the président-directeur général of the automaker Renault, has turned up in the refrigerator of Diapason, a three-star restaurant, where Delage dined earlier that evening with his lawyer. Diapason's owner, eminent chef Jean-Basile Labrousse, is well known to Capucine's restaurant critic husband, Alexandre. What at first appears to be a case of food poisoning is soon ruled a homicide. Capucine's family connections help open political doors and provide useful contacts as she uncovers a plot involving foreign nationals and industrial espionage. Full of amusing characters, this diverting gastronomic mystery builds to a most satisfactory conclusion. Readers will want a second helping. (July)