This tasty concoction will leave you hungry for more

Title: The Art of Killing Well Marco Malvaldi

Marco Malvaldi is known in Italy for his contemporary crime novels set on the Tuscan coast. In contrast, this short and sparkling spoof is set in 1895 in a baronial castle in the Tuscan hills. The seventh Barone di Roccapendente has invited guests for a boar hunt, including a well-travelled gourmet, Pellegrino Artusi, author of a famous Italian cookbook, Science in the Kitchen, and the Art of Eating Well, which inspires the book’s title. Artusi is based on a real-life character, flamboyantly fictionalised here as a good-natured portly gentleman with a long, drooping moustache, who travels with his two equally portly cats in a basket.

The aristocratic inhabitants of the castle are sharply satirised, almost all being ‘wastrels who had never done an hour’s honest work in their lives’. The Baron’s vain, idle, dim-witted sons get an especially hard time, while their more intelligent sister Cecilia is hampered by the restrictions of being a woman in 1895: “At that time, as far as public opinion was concerned, a woman barely had a soul.”