[In the following review, Jakeman argues that The Debt to Pleasure lacks suspense and suffers from too little attention to detail.]

"Who am I? Who are you? And what the fuck's going on?" The reader of John Lanchester's foodie thriller [The Debt to Pleasure] will inevitably sympathize with the narrator's artist brother, Bartholomew. Hamlet-like, he poses these crucial questions while embedded in a mesh of upmarket gourmandise. Lanchester was the restaurant critic of the Observer, so he has the foodie world at his fingertips in the creation of his murderous anti-hero, Tarquin Winot, for whom haute cuisine is a ruling passion.

Tarquin is a full-blow product of the European great tradition—in food as in literature. He liberally scatters his story with rib-nudging cultural references (hypocrite lecteur), whereas Bartholomew represents the untamed, uncivilized, tomato-sauce-loving force of creative genius. The polarization of our society is thus crudely symbolized by the food preferences of the two brothers. So far, so clichéd; but every thriller is essentially a cliché. The question is what the writer does with the givens of the genre.

Not a lot, in this case. The book takes the form of series of seasonal recipes, and although Tarquin's preface claims an elemental role for the menu (and it is true that all structures can be seen as menus), Lanchester's real and unresolved technical problem is that the plot of the recipe is the opposite of the plot of the thriller.

In the recipe, the outcome is declared at the start. We know at the beginning that the bouillabaisse or shepherd's pie, or whatever, will result from the subsequent ingredients and operations, rather as if the name of the murderer were disclosed at the beginning of a detective story. A recipe that serves up any ghastly surprises is a failure, whereas this is precisely what the murder story should do.

And here, indeed, the identity of the murderer is not long in doubt. Barely has young Tarquin finished off the pet hamster before we know that we are dealing with a foodie-psychopath. The only subsequent narrative interest is how, and when, he disposes of his victims. These homicidal episodes occur at such long intervals, between feverish bouts of seasonal cuisine, that such faint undercurrents of tension as the story possesses are dispersed in a welter of gigots and blinis, of lupsup and charcuterie.

To give this book its due, it is a very upmarket Year in Provence. Many smart dinner parties will be racing to keep up with Tarquin's table, and adopting buzz-words from Lanchester's frequent multilingual outbursts of thesaurus-like alimentary vocabulary. Why serve a mere stew when you could call it djuredi, or arni ladorigani, or Bulgarian kaparma? As for the recipe-thriller, it is possible to visualize a new literary game of detective stories in culinary genres: the idiot snobberies of Lord Peter Wimsey rhapsodized à la Elizabeth David, or Delia on the solidly crafted country-house mystery.

I can't see Delia, famous for her thorough research, making the slips that pop out here. Given that Tarquin places such a premium on accuracy—this being for him one of the charms of the recipe—and considering how snobbish he is about vulgar yobs, it is odd that he is so slovenly. He, or his creator, might for example have noticed that David Embury, writer on cocktails, has his name spelled in two different ways on one page, or that a menu du joir is a tad peculiar. I don't think it's a subtle postmodern irony—more late 20th-century editorial exhaustion.

Great stress is laid on Tarquin's fluent French, so perhaps it's a bit daring of this uncultured slob of a reviewer to point out that a sentence such as "the etymology of 'barbecue' is vaut le détour" has become a nonsense because vaut is a verb, or that a "soi-disant cottage-pie" would be a terrifying creature indeed. And Tarquin, like all those who parade their knowledge, comes a terrible cropper ("arse over tip", as Bartholomew would no doubt put it) when he speaks of jostling crowds of "ignorami". The plural of "ignoramus" is "ignoramuses". Well, it must be, mustn't it, since the word already means, "we don't know?" Even a poor ignorant sod of a chip-eating reviewer knows that.