A DISH TAKEN COLD
by Anne Perry
The second in Carroll & Graf’s series of vest-pocket fiction for publisher Otto Penzler (following Ed McBain’s Driving Lessons, p. 838) unfurls an anecdote of condign revenge for the strongest reason of all. One minute widowed Celie Deleure’s infant son Jean-Pierre was sleeping peacefully in his crib; the next he was dead for no apparent reason except the neglect of Amandine Latour, the friend Celie had asked to stand in for her absent nurse. When Thérèse the seamstress tells her that Amandine would never have left the baby unattended if it hadn’t been for the amorous attentions of her lover Georges Coigny, Celie’s grief sharpens to a quest for retribution. And even though she’s only a servant of the celebrated Madame Germaine de Staël, the author and bon vivant who heads Paris’s wittiest salon, and Georges is a self-assured and powerful man, history has offered her the perfect moment for vengeance: the Revolution is just turning into the Terror, a time when the king and queen have been imprisoned for their own protection from angry mobs, and a single word of denunciation from a concerned citizen like Celie is enough to send suspected counter-revolutionaries to the guillotine.
Perry pads this extended short story with just enough thrilling local color and 20/20 historical hindsight to make it a dish best gulped in a sitting—or sent back to the kitchen.