In the Kitchen by Monica Ali

GABRIEL LIGHTFOOT is an enterprising man from a northern English mill town, making good in London. As executive chef at the once-splendid Imperial Hotel, he is trying to run a tight kitchen. Though under constant challenge from the competing demands of an exuberantly multinational staff, a gimlet-eyed hotel management, and business partners with whom he is secretly planning a move to a restaurant of his own, all Gabe's hard work looks set to pay off.
   That is, until a worker is found dead in the kitchen's basement. It is a small death, a lonely death--but it is enough to disturb the tenuous balance of Gabe's life.
   Enter Lena, an eerily attractive young woman with mysterious ties to the dead man. Under her spell, Gabe makes a decision, with consequences that strip him naked and change the course of the life he knows-and the future he thought he had wanted.
   With prose that "crackles with verve and vivacity" (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) and "a truly Dickensian cast of characters" (Buffalo News), In the Kitchen is "part Kitchen Confidential, part murder mystery," and "a window into British society" (The Daily Beast). Ali is sheer pleasure to read, a truly magnificent writer of our time.