Neil Flambé and the Crusader’s Curse

Kevin Sylvester's Neil Flambé and the Crusader's Curse is a mystery for 10 year olds about a chef whose cooking stops working overnight.

What happens

Neil Flambé is fifteen. He runs his own restaurant, he has a nose so good that the local police borrow it for their cases, and, by his cousin's account, he is impossible to share a kitchen with.

Tonight is his birthday and the grand reopening of Chez Flambé. New tables, new silver, new everything, and a dozen dishes he is certain are perfect.

Half the plates come back. Too salty. Too sweet. Something tastes off.

Neil sniffs every one. They are exactly as he intended. He cooks them again, and back they come again, with the same complaints. So he storms out into the restaurant to tell the customers what he thinks of them, and stops dead, because every man has a beard, every woman has a wig, and what his nose is picking up is glue.

Critics. In disguise. At his reopening.

Reading this is like being trapped in a kitchen with somebody brilliant who knows it. Neil throws plates through a closed window. He decides the critics must have been paid to rattle him. He cannot entertain, even briefly, the possibility that he got something wrong. Meanwhile his cousin Larry punctures him with a steady stream of dreadful food puns, and honestly, Larry is the best thing in it.

Behind all this there is a curse. The book opens in 1225 with a cook marooned on a bare rock by the man who had been his teacher, and a deathbed promise that no Flambé will ever cook again without paying a horrible price. It is a proper shiver of a start, and then a mark like a circle and a cross turns up burned into the back door of the restaurant.

A word about the fit. Neil is fifteen, with a girlfriend, a staff and terrifying bills, which is a long way above the shelf age. The writing itself is quick and jokey and aimed much younger, so it works, but do expect a teenage hero. That opening chapter is also bleak for a moment. A man is abandoned to starve, handed a knife and told he can use it when he has had enough.

What to read next

This is the third book about Neil, though it explains itself as it goes. If your reader wants more of him, the Duel in the Desert is here as well. Neil and Larry drive a food truck welded together out of an old camper and a silver trailer towards a desert ranch, a treasure map and a lost mine.