The Groaning Board

by Annette Meyers

Book Overview

Doing business with a carriage trade caterer proves to be more than gastronomic disaster for headhunter Leslie Wetzon and her poison-tongued colleague Xenia Smith. In The Groaning Board, Annette... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 038547654X
• ISBN13: 9780385476546
• Release Date: May 1997
• Publisher: Doubleday Books
• Length: 321 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.5" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Good Eats

Annette Meyers is a longtime New Yorker and was a former assistant to Broadway producer Hal Prince and vice president at a headhunting firm, and all three professions provide the backdrop and spice to "The Groaning Board," her seventh mystery featuring Xenia Smith and Leslie Wetzon.This is one of those mysteries where the secondary stories are just as entertaining as the whodunit. Wetzon, the former dancer partnered with Smith in their growing headhunting firm, acts as her own Watson as she investigates the death of one of the characters associated with The Groaning Board, the gourmet store partway through its 15 minutes of fame. Its principals are fighting over an initial public offering that can stand to make them millions, and the sharks are circling over this potential gold mine.Meyers is a writer with the cheek to install a solitary Fabio in the background of a restaurant scene and razz at his declining celebrity, as well as to insert a quotation from one of the book's characters into the fronts piece. She's talented enough to create Xenia Smith, a barracuda whose cheerful duplicity and unabashed greed manages to retain the affection of both Wetzon and the reader. She also does for New York City in detective fiction what Woody Allen does in film: showing us the glamor and the attractions of the city that never sleeps. To Meyers, New York is a nice place to visit and you would want to live there, and it is be a measure of the city's place in fiction that this attitude comes across as fresh, almost revolutionary.

Not up to Meyers usual standard

Disappointing ... although still a page turner, I found The Groaning Board to be less than expected. While, fortunately, Smith was less in evidence, unfortunately so was Carlos, the wittiest of the bunch. Another breakup with Silvestri and within minutes (or so it seems), Wetzon has found someone new, not necessarily an improvement. Another sleek "sensitive", rich lawyer without the moodiness of Silvestri but also without much of an interesting character. Let's hope the next time out will see Meyers back to the level she attained previously.

This author writes great mysteries

.....Xenia Smith and Leslie Wezon are partners in a Wall Street executive search firm. They go to the Groaning Board, a popular food store, to arrange catering for an upcoming dinner party they plan to host. At the establishment, Smith and Wezon meet the co-owners, A.T. Barron and Micklynn Devora, a squabbling team whose seemingly irreconcilable differences appears to be dooming the lucrative business. Not much after that visit, people are being poisoned by food made at the Groaning Board. At least one person, a former girl friend of Leslie's lover, has died. This incident leads to the break up of Leslie's relationship. .......When the evidence points towards Micklynn as the prime suspect, she hires Leslie, who begins to investigate the poisoning. Leslie soon finds her own life in jeopardy as someone obviously does no want her to uncover the truth behind the food poisoning incidents. Leslie may learn that it is safer on Wall Street than it is on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, but that lesson may have been learned too late. .....THE GROANING BOARD is a gourmet's delight due to its brilliant lead characters and their interactions and reactions to each other and to other players. The business world is an intriguingly insightful backdrop to a well written who-done-it. All seven Smith and Wezon novels are worth reading by fans who enjoy intricately woven characters (think DNA double helix) and a glimpse inside the Manhattan business world. ..... Harriet Klausner