I continue to read this series because of the great descriptions of food. I love to cook, and to read about cooking (I read cookbooks for fun), and the thing I love most about this series is that there's none of this "They ate dinner" nonsense; the exact dinner, often including how things are prepared is lovingly described.

That being said- I think some of the other reviews are way off when they trust King to have his facts straight about the details of food and wine. I am hardly an expert, yet in every book so far I've encountered at least one whopper of misinformation; enough to make me mistrust the "facts" of all the other data. In this one, for example, one of the top 3 chefs in Italy was very fussy and refused to serve any parmesan cheese that was not freshly made that day. And.. parm is widely renowned for being an AGED cheese. There can not possibly be anything like fresh-that-day parm. Given the context, he may have meant mozzarella... though that did not seem to me to be working in terms of flavor and texture in the context. There is also a reference to deadly interactions between Prozac and unspecified vegetables; while I have not extensively googled this, I have seen no such connection in actuality. Given, these, I wonder how much more misinformation is in all the "facts" that King cites and that people seem to be trusting to be true.

I like learning random facts from novels. Unfortunately, King makes enough stuff up that I cannot trust him as reliable.

And then we have the same problem here as with the others; for some reason- unknown- Our Hero is irresistible to the ladies. OK, this time the gorgeous chick seems to be getting paid for it, but still- I think we're looking at a real Marty Stu here.

Plotwise- recently, there's been a meme going around that says in part "Getting your protags INTO trouble via coincidence is fine. Getting them OUT of trouble because of coincidence is cheating." King cheats a lot this way.

I guess the difference between a good book with an unreliable narrator, and a mediocre book with an unreliable narrator, is partly whether or not the author realizes that the narrator is unreliable. I see no reason to believe that King recognizes this.

Still- lovely food descriptions! They're3 good enough to make me want to occasionally read one of these novels. ( )