Too Many Cooks - Plot Introduction

Plot Introduction

"It is not decent to induce the cocaine habit in a man, but it is monstrous to do so and then suddenly withdraw his supply of the drug. Nature plainly intends that a man should nourish a woman, and a woman a man, physically and spiritually, but there is no nourishment in you for anybody; the vapor that comes from you, from your eyes, your lips, your soft skin, your contours, your movements, is not beneficent but malignant."

— Nero Wolfe, articulating a specific animus toward Marko's ex-wife, in Too Many Cooks, chapter 9

Wolfe, a knowledgeable gourmet as well as a detective, attends a meeting of great chefs, The Fifteen Masters, at a resort in West Virginia, and jealousies among them soon lead to strife; then, one of the chefs is murdered. Wolfe sustains his own injury in the course of finding the culprit but also obtains the secret recipe for saucisse minuit.