Stanley Park

Jeremy Papier, the new Alice Waters of the Vancouver food scene, is fast becoming known for his radically rear-guard cuisine -- tradition-steeped dishes that celebrate the bounty of the Pacific Northwest. His restaurant is always booked, and his Fraser Valley duck breast and Saltspring Island lamb are the talk of the local foodies. The Monkey's Paw Bistro is unquestionably an artistic triumph. Pity it is something less than a well-run business.

Far too costly ever to turn a profit, The Paw is kited on dozens of Jeremy's maxed-out credit cards. An old family friend, Dante Beale, founder of a worldwide chain of cookie-cutter coffee bars, is willing to bail the restaurant out -- on condition that he become majority owner. It's a business proposition made in hell, one strenuously opposed by Jeremy's pretty young sous-chef, the incorruptible, plainspoken Jules Capelli.

Jeremy's problems deepen when his eccentric academic father -- an obsessed, half-mad "participatory anthropologist" -- loses himself among the homeless in Vancouver's Stanley Park. He lives as they do (he's especially adept at catching and roasting starlings) and soon involves Jeremy in researching a "cold case" crime, the real-life murder of two children in the park in the late 1940s.