Title & buy link: Raw Cut
Author: K.T. Forbes
Cover Artist: Trace Edward Zaber
Publisher: Amber Allure
Amazon buy link: Raw Cut
Genre: M/M contemporary
Length: Short Novel (53,000 words)
Rating: 2 stars out of 5
A guest review by Leslie S
Review summary: Predictable narrative with technical issues.
Blurb
The kitchen behind a prestigious New York City restaurant can be a brutal place for a brilliant young chef to learn the ropes. But Cabell Scott is tough and talented… more than up to the task. After all, he has a dream to own a fine establishment one day. And he’s willing to do whatever it takes to make that happen.
It’s not long before the gorgeous line cook attracts the attention of the legendary chef, Moreau Givan, who is more than willing to teach Cabell the fine points of culinary technique. When the relationship between them moves from the kitchen to the bedroom, Cabell finds himself on a path of discovery that encompasses far more than his cooking skill.
As Cabell works his way up the ranks in professional kitchens, his tumultuous love life nearly topples his career. And when his newly opened restaurant is threatened by his past, Cabell is forced to take his own measure as he wrestles with a decision that will set the course for the rest of his life.
Review
Sometimes I wonder if blurb writing is a lost art. While this blurb does describe what happens in the book, it’s also misleading. Cabell’s decision is made in the middle of the book, not as a result of the threat to his restaurant, for example. This is indicative of the writing and timeline within the book itself, which frankly was a hot mess and needed better editorial work.
The book opens with Cabell reeling from a bad review of his restaurant. An influential New York critic with a penchant for disguise has just trashed the menu he’s worked so hard on. His thoughts lead us straight into a flashback, which starts at 2% of the book on my Kindle… and doesn’t end until 82%. Yes, you read that right. 80% of the book is technically written as a flashback. This could have been fixed very easily by separating out the first 2% as a separate chapter and tweaking other scenes accordingly, but frankly a good editor would have cut that part altogether and started at the first point of action.
I wish that was my only issue with the story, but it’s not. Through this interminable flashback we follow Cabell’s rise from lowly dish-washer to sous chef in a prestigious New York restaurant. Cabell catches the eye of master chef Moreau Givan (imagine Marco Pierre White on speed) and allows himself to be seduced, but Moreau falls in love and is a demanding as well as forgetful and selfish boyfriend, eventually leading Cabell to take a sabbatical from the kitchen and go back home.
His father advises Cabell to consider all his options and follow his dreams, but Cabell is young and stubborn and set on achieving the goals he originally set himself. When he meets David Regent, a bookshop owner interested in local history, Cabell is momentarily distracted by a ‘what if’. It’s enough for him to end his relationship with Moreau, but instead of going back to David, Cabell continues on in New York in an attempt to run his own Michelin-starred establishment—except things don’t turn out quite the way he planned…
I didn’t find any of the characters particularly likeable, with the exception of Perry, Cabell’s father. I found Cabell very arrogant and smug, which may well be the way professional chefs are, but he needed some redeeming feature to make me care about him and there wasn’t anything that stood out. David was bland and went from being passive to having all the answers in a self-help kind of way. Moreau was hilarious for all the wrong reasons, from his porn star dialogue to his incredibly one-dimensional characterisation, and the less said about his redemption, the better.
There’s a lot of info dumps and although the narrative itself is competent, sometimes the author began telling rather than showing, which resulted in several key scenes being dealt with quickly (the undercover reporter, for example), while other scenes, especially the sex scenes between Cabell and Moreau, were drawn out without any real furtherance of plot or character. This led to some very uneven pacing throughout the book, which on top of the flashback thing made me want to fling my Kindle out of the window. It felt like this book should have been a full-length novel but the author got bored and cut key scenes right back just to move things along.
The restaurant reviewer plot which formed the frame for the story may have worked if it hadn’t been completely obvious whodunit and why from the outset. Ultimately the most memorable thing about it was the cheesy sex, but that’s not really a recommendation. If you’re more into fiction found on the pages of porn mags, the style of this book won’t be unusual to you, but it really did not work for me, technically or in a narrative sense.