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.