A Bitter Feast

 by Deborah Crombie

This mystery takes place in a small village in England.  A married couple, who are police officers, are invited to come and bring their three children to the family home of a colleague.  The colleague's mother is holding a fund raising luncheon.  The mother of the family drives to the family estate with the female officer.  Her husband plans to drive up on his own later in the day.

The colleague's parents are wealthy, owner's of a newspaper publishing empire.  The colleague is always reluctant to tell people who here parents are.

There is a small pub restaurant in the nearby village.  One evening a local woman is sitting having dinner and notices a distinguished looking man also alone.  Shortly after the man goes into the kitchen and there is a lot of shouting.  The chef tells him to get out.  The man storms out of the pub leaving his coat behind. 

The woman leaves shortly after.  As she is driving home she sees the man from the pub staggering on the road.  She is a former nurse and sees the man is in distress.  She offers him a ride and then quickly sets off to the nearest hospital.  But they don't make it to the hospital.  She crashes into the car of the police officer who had been driving up to join his family.  The woman and the man in her car both die, but the woman mumbles something to the police officer who is injured but not seriously.  

The plot thickens when the police find out the man in the car was dead before the accident and as he has no id on him they don't know who he is.  After interviewing locals no one can explain why the woman would have had the man in her car.  People don't think that she knew him.

It then turns out that the dead man was a formerly famous chef who has fallen on hard times. He had come to try to woe the local chef to join him in a new restaurant endeavour in London.  The chef had wanted nothing to do with him.  We later find out that the chef was the father of her child and has threatened for joint custody if she doesn't agree.

Later the bartender is found dead on the side of the road.  It is clear he was hit on purpose and then bludgeoned.

Throughout the book the police that are visiting are working along with the local police to try to figure out what is going on.  Eventually it comes out that the partner of the local chef has killed the London chef because she doesn't want to lose her partner.  She killed the bartender because he had seen her talking to the London chef on the night he died.

This was the first book I have read by this author.  I enjoyed. it. was a interesting story but there were a lot of characters and an additional plot about the police officer from the wealthy family having a musician boyfriend she ends up breaking up with. There was another plot with two employees of the wealthy family skimming funds from the family.  These were extraneous as far as I am concerned.