Three Crime Novels by Anthony Bourdain: Bone in the Throat, Gone Bamboo, and The Bobby Gold Stories

"DELICIOUSLY DEPRAVED" –The New York Times on Bone in the Throat

Rediscover the legendary Anthony Bourdain through his three wild crime novels full of criminal cooks, bloody kitchens, and extra-sharp knives.

It was the seedy 1990s, and Anthony Bourdain was an anonymous headband-clad chef in New York City. Sweating over gas ranges and mouthing off with the criminals-turned-prep cooks working the line, he loved the camaraderie of cleaving beef bones and pilfering booze with the troublemakers of the world. It was all part of a good kitchen, and to him, it was art.

Bourdain's first book, Bone in the Throat, was pulled from the entrails of this world. The breakneck mafia caper follows a wannabe chef named Tommy who, like Bourdain, is fresh out of culinary school in Manhattan. He settles for a stint at a red sauce joint in Little Italy, unaware that the restaurant is in deep trouble with the mob-and that now he is too. After publication, Bourdain spent a year in St. Martin to “straighten himself out.” Then came Gone Bamboo, a hysterical crime thriller that follows Henry, a CIA-trained assassin who retires to St. Martin after a botched murder job-but scores aren't settled that easily. It was only then that Bourdain published Kitchen Confidential, the now-canonical book that made him a legend. But before cleaning up his act for good, Bourdain had one final job: to write The Bobby Gold Stories, his last ever novel, which follows a once-scrawny Bobby as he does eight years in prison and comes out a hardened brute. When Bobby takes a job at a mobbed-up club, he falls for a fiery line cook named Nikki who brings more trouble than even he knows how to handle.

Full of knife-slinging chefs, fast-talking criminals, and the kitchens that harbor them all, these books reveal Bourdain's mind before his fame. “You can find him, I think, in these early novels” (Eater), and he's Bourdain as you've never known him before.