Bestselling author Tony Bourdain is back with a new novel, his first fiction since the groundbreaking success of Kitchen Confidential.

Bobby Gold is a loveable criminal. After doing ten years in the clinker, he's out and ready for work. With not even an attempt to play it straight, he's back to breaking bones for tough guys. His turf: the club scene and restaurant racket. It's not that he enjoys the job-Bobby has real heart-but he's good at it and a guy has to make a living. Things change when he meets Nikki, the cook at a club most definitely not in his territory. Smitten, he can't stay away. Bobby Gold had known trouble before, but with Nikki the sauté bitch in his life, things take a turn for life or death.

Inspired by Fitzgerald's Pat Hobby stories, The Bobby Gold Stories is a gem of a novel featuring the best of Bourdain's work. Fans will recognize the gangster riffs of Bone in the Throat, the antics of the sexy criminal couple of Gone Bamboo, and the brilliant restaurant scenes from Kitchen Confidential. Distilled into a fast and furious, pitch-perfect story of food, sex, crimes and mayhem, The Bobby Gold Stories is sure to become a modern classic.

Amazon.com Review
Author Anthony Bourdain is a talented chef whose two previous thrillers (Bone in the Throat, Gone Bamboo) were seasoned with the kind of culinary details that delighted the Food Channel-loving fans of his successful nonfiction books. The foodies will slaver over a wonderfully wrought scene in his latest caper novel--it's set at a chic Manhattan restaurant where a gourmand gangster with a picky palate turns the chef's menu upside down and stiffs the poor waiter who has to accommodate him. But the rest of this otherwise slight and unseasoned novel doesn't live up to that wonderful appetizer. Its protagonist is Bobby Gold, an ex-con who works as a security guard at Eddie Fish's Nightclub and is involved with a sexy sous-chef named Nikki whose preparation of a special meal for her lover reads like Bourdain's version of foreplay. But when Nikki rips off the restaurant receipts and Bobby gets on the wrong side of a mob plan to kill Eddie's appetite for good while recouping the money, Bourdain's plotting goes sour and the ending fails to satisfy. Still, it's a nice side dish to go with a good cookbook, or even one of the author's zany true stories of what goes on behind the swinging doors of many real-life restaurants (Kitchen Confidential, A Cook's Tour). --Jane Adams