Overwhelmed by debts despite the success of his Pacific Northwest restaurant, Jeremy Papier agonizes over turning control over to a family friend who would bail him out of his troubles despite the firm objections of his chef, a situation that is further complicated when his eccentric father involves him in an urban murder mystery. In Timothy Taylor's debut novel Stanley Park , aspiring food artiste Jeremy Papier attempts to juggle the finances of his fledgling eatery, The Monkey's Paw, and his conflicted feelings about his attractive sous-chef. Meanwhile, on the other side of downtown Vancouver, his anthropologist father camps out in Stanley Park to study a group of homeless men. Impending financial ruin drives Jeremy into the clutches of an evil coffee magnate while his father delves deeper into the indigent lifestyle, probing the mystery of two dead children once found in the park as well as his failed marriage to Jeremy's mother. A tragicomic denouement takes the characters back to their human roots as hunter-gatherers in the 21st century. The big idea in Stanley Park is that global corporate culture threatens the local connections that sustain us. Only the outcasts in Stanley Park retain these connections, and one of them imparts to Jeremy the secret of trapping a swan: "'Stinky box does it,' Caruzo informed, scratching himself. 'Stinky box is all.'" He retrieves a discarded hot dog shipping box and explains the technique: "'I distract him.' Caruzo said. 'You kill him. Distract. Kill.'" Though our hero cannot bring himself to dispatch the bird, he understands the basic link with nature. Stanley Park isn't Crime and Punishment and doesn't pretend to be, even if the vocabulary is sometimes a little pretentious. Taylor, who won Canada's 2000 Journey Prize for his short fiction, tells a good story, creating plausible characters for this coming-of-age narrative and making a good start to a novelistic career. --Robyn Gillam, Amazon.ca Many mysteries--almost all of Dick Francis', for example--serve up an insider's view of this or that subculture or occupation along with the main course. The priorities are reversed in Taylor's debut novel, as the mystery, which involves the unsolved murders of two children some 30 years ago in Vancouver's sprawling Stanley Park, takes a backseat to the activities of brilliant young chef Jeremy Papier. The chef's father, a "participatory anthropologist" living among the homeless in Stanley Park, enlists his son to help solve the long-ago crime, but the greater suspense involves the plight of Chef Papier's popular but financially imperiled new restaurant, and the greater pleasure derives from the deliciously detailed descriptions of his culinary creations. Anyone who likes to eat will be fascinated. Dennis Dodge Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved "Extraordinarily creative...Taylor may be on his way to becoming the head chef of Canadian Letters." -- Winnipeg Free Press "This delicious first novel must be savored." -- Toronto Globe and Mail "This is a powerful debut; expect to hear a lot from [Timothy Taylor]." -- Edmonton Journal Timothy Taylor is a winner of the Journey Prize, the Canadian equivalent of the O. Henry Award, and the only writer ever to have had three stories chosen for a single volume of the annual Journey Prize Anthology . His debut collection, Silent Cruise and Other Stories , will be published by Counterpoint in Fall 2002. Born in Venezuela in 1963, he lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, and is currently at work on a second novel. Used Book in Good Condition