Fourth in the series: Henry is still running his restaurant, but in this book becomes a celebrity chef: after becoming a regular panellist on "A Question of Salt", he writes books, endorses various products, and generally prospers. But someone appears to be out to get him.
I had bought this book when it came out, and hadn't read it for over a year, partly to save it and partly because I was worried it would be a bit of a let-down like The Legacy of Reginald Perrin. But in fact it turned out to be very good: a worthy addition to the Pratt canon.
I broke off from writing this review in February to get my dissertation finished. It's now July.... I'll flesh out this review when next I read the book.
Re-read in 2016 - I read all four Pratt books in sequence. This is the weakest and I'm a bit torn over whether it might be better if he'd stopped with three. It felt that a lot of what's good in this book is the momentum of the characters and back-story from the previous three, and the new stuff with Henry's celebrity is a bit weak. I think, although perhaps I'm projecting, is that it feels like the first three are reasonably autobiographical, and so were stories ready to be told, but that this one is a novel where he's tried to make up some new plot.
I didn't really like the person that Henry started to become in this book, but I think that was intentional - Hilary didn't like him either.
There were only a couple of places I highlighted in the book, which is in notable contrast to all the sections I wanted to quote in the first one
He'd reflected once or twice recently how strange it was that, after moments of desperation when he'd been convinced that no woman would ever fancy him, he had begun to believe that almost every woman did.
'He'd sit there, where Vera's sitting...' began Norma Hutton.
'I'm not Vera,' said the woman in the chair that Norma had pointed at.
'Yes, you are, dear.'
'Am I? Oh.'
On the whole it is worth reading but I thought it was a bit of a disappointment.
Completed : 6-Feb-2008
Completed : 3-Jul-2016