A Little Leg Work

When you order a meal in a restaurant, how can you be sure you get what you asked for? Isn't that meat a little pale to be beef? And what tastes like chicken doesn't mean it's actually chicken. The thing is, most diners are completely oblivious as to what goes on in a restaurant's kitchen. They order, eat and pay, with no clue as to where the food has come from.

Take the Alfresco Paradiso in A Little Leg Work. When this renowned Italian restaurant turns to a new food source, with surprising and sickening results, it means a plate of meatballs will never be the same again. And while no one knows what the Alfresco's chefs are up to, the public loves it and gobbles it up. A local detective (and weekend gourmet chef) tries to find out just what it is that makes the meatballs so good, while his brother-in-law, a journalist, smells a page one story. Meanwhile, the Alfresco owner becomes a celebrity and all those involved in the restaurant start rolling in the cash, including a butcher, an adventurer and a morgue manager. They all get to tell their own story and have their say because the book is told from numerous points of view.

Royce Leville's debut novel pushes the boundaries of taste and the limits of traditional narrative style. Replete with footnotes, multiple narrators, gristly scenes and thousands of satisfied eaters, A Little Leg Work will disgust, intrigue, amuse and offend, and leave you salivating for more.

'A Little Leg Work' won the fiction category and finished runner-up in the grand prize at the 2012 Next Generation Indie Book Awards.