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Too Many Cooks

238 statements
46 feature instances
2 referencing feature instances

Too Many Cooks	type	TVTItem
Too Many Cooks	label	Too Many Cooks
Too Many Cooks	page	TooManyCooks
Too Many Cooks	comment	A 1938 mystery novel by Rex Stout, and fifth in the series of novels about the obese gourmet private detective Nero Wolfe. (For the unrelated 2014 dark comedy short film, go here, and for the unrelated play, go here.)An invitation from Les Quinze MaÃ®tres, a society of elite chefs, has convinced Nero Wolfe to do the unimaginable and leave his New York brownstone to travel by train to an exclusive spa resort in West Virginia. There, he expects merely to experience — or at least suffer through — a rare vacation and deliver a speech on American cuisine to the assembled society. Instead, underneath the beauty of the resort and the cultured surface of the chefs, he discovers a seething tangle of tension, bitterness, hatred and racial injustice, much of which seems to tie back in some way to the arrogant and scheming Phillip Laszio. When a murder is committed, Wolfe and Archie Goodwin will need to muster all their intelligence and abilities to untangle the matter — a task made even more difficult by the lack of trust between the authorities, the guests and the African American serving staff.
Too Many Cooks	fetched	2024-02-29T15:31:10Z
Too Many Cooks	parsed	2024-02-29T15:31:10Z
Too Many Cooks	isPartOf	DBTropes
Too Many Cooks / int_10d36992	type	Parrying Bullets
Too Many Cooks / int_10d36992	comment	Parrying Bullets: When Wolfe is shot at through his hotel room window while rehearsing his speech, Archie manages to deflect the bullet's trajectory by throwing his copy of the speech at the window right as the shot is fired, thus sending it onto a less lethal or at least less damaging path. A downplayed trope, however, as the bullet still gets through, and Archie does concede that there's no way to know for sure and he could even have deflected the bullet the other way instead.
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Too Many Cooks / int_17501df2	type	Cool Old Guy
Too Many Cooks / int_17501df2	comment	Cool Old Guy: Several of the Fifteen Masters, none of whom are exactly young men, as well as hotel chefs Grant and Crabtree.
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Too Many Cooks / int_1d2400e9	type	Green-Eyed Monster
Too Many Cooks / int_1d2400e9	comment	Green-Eyed Monster: Phillip Laszio clearly doesn't enjoy watching his wife make the moves on practically any other man she comes across.
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Too Many Cooks / int_1f799027	type	Obstructive Bureaucrat
Too Many Cooks / int_1f799027	comment	Obstructive Bureaucrat: Downplayed; Barry Tolman isn't the worst authority figure who has or will appear in a Wolfe novel, but he is kind of a pompous and officious jerk. He's also not free of the racist attitudes of his time and place, though he is generally a bit less enthusiastically bigoted than the local sheriff.
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Too Many Cooks / int_234fa9ba	type	Mayâ€“December Romance
Too Many Cooks / int_234fa9ba	comment	Mayâ€“December Romance: Laszio is quite a bit older than his wife (either twice her age, or twice her father's age, depending on the chapter). Lawrence Coyne, another member of the group, is pushing eighty and married to a woman in her twenties or thirties. It's also implied that Lisette Putti, the supposed "niece" of Ramsey Keith, is in fact a call-girl, courtesan, or kept mistress.
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Too Many Cooks / int_23698fa8	type	Aborted Arc
Too Many Cooks / int_23698fa8	comment	Aborted Arc: Archie strikes up a friendship with the spa's house detective and gives consideration to the mans request to try and get him the job as House Detective at the luxurious New York hotel where Laszio worked at, reasoning that having someone who owed him a favor there would be useful in the business. This subplot doesn't receive any closure, though, possibly because the New York hotel manager turns out to be the murderer, and thus unlikely to endorse any friend of Archie's for a job..
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Too Many Cooks / int_295087bf	type	Non-Indicative Name
Too Many Cooks / int_295087bf	comment	Non-Indicative Name: Les Quinze MaÃ®tres means "The Fifteen Masters", but only ten of them actually appear. Three have died without yet being replaced, and two simply couldn't attend this particular gathering.
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Too Many Cooks / int_2ae277ab	type	Mauve Shirt
Too Many Cooks / int_2ae277ab	comment	Mauve Shirt: Sergei Valenko is one of the least characterized members of the Fifteen Masters, but is also one of the ones without an alibi for Laszio's death, making him more of a suspect than some of the others.
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Too Many Cooks / int_3ed23024	type	Surprisingly Realistic Outcome
Too Many Cooks / int_3ed23024	comment	Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Perhaps less surprising for the contemporary reader, but nevertheless: the murderer adopts blackface to disguise himself as one of the African American wait-staff and thus get close to his victim. While the primarily white guests don't pay any attention to him, one of the actual wait-staff immediately sees through the disguise.
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Too Many Cooks / int_3fe2b13f	type	Ungrateful Bastard
Too Many Cooks / int_3fe2b13f	comment	Ungrateful Bastard: Jerome Berin is less grateful than one might think towards a man who got him off a wrongful charge of murder, reacting with indignant outrage when Wolfe demands the recipe for his sausages as payment. Wolfe basically has to remind him that honor is now in play here, that this is the least he can do, and that if Wolfe can't have the sausages he'll have the world knowing that Berin is an ungrateful and ungallant snake instead as compensation.
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Too Many Cooks / int_434d893c	type	Funny Foreigner
Too Many Cooks / int_434d893c	comment	Funny Foreigner: Several of the MaÃ®tres get a bit of this treatment, particularly Pierre Mondor and his wife, Domenico Rossi, and arguably Berin himself.
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Too Many Cooks / int_4aaffbd5	type	I Never Said It Was Poison
Too Many Cooks / int_4aaffbd5	comment	I Never Said It Was Poison: The murderer is partly tripped up this way. Specifically, Raymond Liggett mentions the name of the sauce used in the taste-testing contest the chefs engaged in, despite supposedly being out of the state at the time and having no possible way of learning the information.
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Too Many Cooks / int_4c9d226e	type	Formerly Fit
Too Many Cooks / int_4c9d226e	comment	Formerly Fit: Discussed; Wolfe discusses engaging in a dangerous cross-continental mission for the Spanish government during his younger years, implying he was this.
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Too Many Cooks / int_4f4372e9	type	Early-Installment Weirdness
Too Many Cooks / int_4f4372e9	comment	Early-Installment Weirdness: While not quite as bad as some of the other characters, Archie Goodwin openly expresses some racist sentiments which, while perhaps not entirely unexpected for a white man of his time and place, nevertheless clash notably with the more tolerant individual he becomes in later books.
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Too Many Cooks / int_4f6cf75	type	Mirroring Factions
Too Many Cooks / int_4f6cf75	comment	Mirroring Factions: A key theme of the novel is race relations in America, but while the racism faced by the African Americans present at Kanawha Spa is the most obvious example of this, there are also some other threads subtly woven through the story that suggest that many others have experienced similar problems: Lio Coyne, the Chinese wife of one of the chefs, is a key witness to the murder, but when confronted admits to Wolfe and Archie that she's afraid to go to the police because she's Chinese and has faced prejudice from them. When Raymond Liggett and Albert Malfi, Laszio's assistant, attempt to hire Wolfe to solve Laszio's murder, Liggett makes a crack about Malfi's violent temper which Malfi, a Corsican, feels moved to downplay. It's also revealed that Albert changed his name from Alberto, presumably to avoid his immigrant background from stymying his career prospects. Wolfe himself brings up his own immigrant background when interviewing the African-American service staff, because he's trying to establish a similarity between them. He doesn't say it in as many words, but the implication is that he has faced similar hostility, racism, and prejudice to them because he was not a born American.
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Too Many Cooks / int_505ec51b	type	Immigrant Patriotism
Too Many Cooks / int_505ec51b	comment	Immigrant Patriotism: While it's been hinted in previous novels that Wolfe spent a lot of time running around the globe having adventures before settling down to his current lifestyle, this novel is the first time it's directly confirmed that he is an immigrant to America. It comes as he's making a monologue hailing America for the openness and opportunities it has provided him to the African-American serving staff, while still acknowledging that it's far from perfect:
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Too Many Cooks / int_5313c266	type	Bookends
Too Many Cooks / int_5313c266	comment	Book Ends: The novel begins and ends with Wolfe and Archie on a train, encountering Jerome Berin and his daughter.
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Too Many Cooks / int_570f2124	type	Minor Injury Overreaction
Too Many Cooks / int_570f2124	comment	Minor Injury Overreaction: Played with, since a gunshot isn't exactly a minor injury, but it is noted that when someone shoots at Wolfe later in the story, his wound is essentially a fairly minor scratch that won't even scar. Wolfe, however, makes a big deal of it to a deeply relieved Archie.
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Too Many Cooks / int_59907e4f	type	Police Are Useless
Too Many Cooks / int_59907e4f	comment	Police Are Useless: And in this case, also racist. When the sheriff starts bullying two of the waiters whom Wolfe convinces to come forward with what they know, Wolfe acidly shuts him down by pointing out that his swaggering and antagonistic approach failed to identify some obvious clues whereas Wolfe managed to produce them simply by having respectful conversations with those involved. Also, when Wolfe is shot at by the killer, the two deputies who show up would rather throw their weight around rather than do anything which might catch the man.
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Too Many Cooks / int_5eb8a669	type	"Angry Black Man" Stereotype
Too Many Cooks / int_5eb8a669	comment	"Angry Black Man" Stereotype: A proto-example; as it's West Virginia in the 1930s, this is deeply hidden underneath layers of enforced politeness and servility, but Paul Whipple, who is studying anthropology on top of working as a waiter, is clearly not happy to be spending his working days waiting hand and foot on a lot of wealthy, intolerant white people. His fellow wait-staff, while not exactly disagreeing with his broader points, view him as being not only hot-headed and provocative but also rather condescending towards them, as he tends to assume that he's the only one who resents the way he's treated and is capable of doing anything to resist it. Wolfe earns his respect through acknowledging his resentments and also being willing to speak to him as one man to another, rather than as a white man expecting servility from a black man.
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Too Many Cooks / int_5fd14ab3	type	Sacred Hospitality
Too Many Cooks / int_5fd14ab3	comment	Sacred Hospitality: Wolfe appreciates being the guest of Les Quinze MaÃ®tres and tries to accommodate them as much as he can. Berin is also incensed by the attempt to kill Wolfe while he was their guest and had just done them a great service, ranting about how killing Phillip Laszio may have been somewhat commendable, but that going after Wolfe was a Moral Event Horizon.
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Too Many Cooks / int_66dfe36a	type	Missing Mom
Too Many Cooks / int_66dfe36a	comment	Missing Mom: One of the chefs, Hyacinth Brown, is a single father after his wife left him and their three children.
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Too Many Cooks / int_6b35bdff	type	Serious Business
Too Many Cooks / int_6b35bdff	comment	Serious Business: Berin's sausages. While chasing an enemy agent in World War I, Wolfe stopped off for lunch at a French country inn and had the sausages made by the house cook, the innkeeper's son. They have stuck with him ever since. He wanted to meet Berin then, but had to pursue his target. He's since made multiple attempts to reverse-engineer the sausages, purchasing originals and then getting other chefs and, once, a chemist, to try to figure out what made them so good. No one's been able to figure it out. Berin thinks they're serious business, too, proclaiming he threw an enemy's imitation of them onto the carpet, and bragging that he has never shared the recipe with anyone, even when he was took sick to work. Wolfe's major motivation to be at the meeting of Les Quinze MaÃ®tres is to try to buy the recipe from Berin. According to Archie's sardonic narration, everyone in the brownstone acted like Wolfe's train journey from New York to West Virginia for a three-night weekend vacation was akin to him setting off for a years-long trek across the entire continent of Africa by foot, with significant likelihood of never returning. For those unaware and curious, it's a fourteen hour train journey of about five hundred miles — not exactly a trivial distance, but also not a voyage requiring the preparations and emotional investment that those other than Archie were putting into it either. Raymond Liggett seems absurdly desperate to hire Wolfe to persuade Jerome Berin to work in his restaurant. Wolfe realises that Liggett is actually trying to buy him off from investigating the death of Phillip Lazsio.
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Too Many Cooks / int_6bccf2ba	type	Supreme Chef
Too Many Cooks / int_6bccf2ba	comment	Supreme Chef: Les Quinze MaÃ®tres is an organisation composed of these.
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Too Many Cooks / int_729c69f3	type	Politically Incorrect Villain
Too Many Cooks / int_729c69f3	comment	Politically Incorrect Villain: Downplayed, since it wasn't exactly considered politically incorrect at the time, but considering that Stout was critiquing those attitudes and it certainly is now: the murderer dons Blackface in order to disguise himself as one of the serving staff.
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Too Many Cooks / int_77b03c0a	type	Remember the New Guy?
Too Many Cooks / int_77b03c0a	comment	Remember the New Guy?: This is the first book to feature Marko Vukcic, Wolfe's childhood friend and owner of his favorite restaurant, who becomes a prominent supporting character for the remainder of the series.
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Too Many Cooks / int_7e95adeb	type	High-Class Call Girl
Too Many Cooks / int_7e95adeb	comment	High-Class Call Girl: Though not stated in so many words, it is speculated by other guests and heavily implied that Ramsey Keith's beautiful "niece," Lisette Putti, is actually one of these, or at least a kept mistress. Not least because he's Scottish and she's Italian, making an actual uncle-niece relationship between them unlikely.
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Too Many Cooks / int_805deb6e	type	Small Role, Big Impact
Too Many Cooks / int_805deb6e	comment	Small Role, Big Impact: Saul Panzer (for this book only, not the main series, where he's a regular character) only shows up for the end of the story, but has gathered evidence (from a line of inquiry Wolfe thought worth pursuing) which helps nail the killer.
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Too Many Cooks / int_823c6e3e	type	Large Ham
Too Many Cooks / int_823c6e3e	comment	Large Ham: An appropriate alternate name for "The Fifteen Masters" apparently would have been "The Fifteen Hams." Being a collection of highly-strung master chefs with healthily developed egos, each of them tends to react to personal setbacks, perceived insults and wayward situations with bellowing, creative declarations of animus, childish displays of pique and general dramatics. Jerome Berin seems to be the winner in this respect.
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Too Many Cooks / int_8aa0f76	type	Deconstructed Trope
Too Many Cooks / int_8aa0f76	comment	Deconstructed Trope: A plot-crucial one, so it's in spoilers, but as part of his critique of contemporary racial attitudes Stout also engages in some deconstructing of a particularly noxious but popular-at-the-time trope: In order to disguise himself, the (white) murderer darkens his skin and adopts blackface to try and blend in amongst the African American waitstaff. While it was common for this to be used as a method of disguise at the time, one of the waiters who encountered him scathingly notes that he can tell the difference between a person with actual dark skin and a person who has applied burned cork to his skin because of course he can.
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Too Many Cooks / int_8ed5c6e4	type	Asshole Victim
Too Many Cooks / int_8ed5c6e4	comment	Asshole Victim: Even among the plentiful examples of this trope within Rex Stout's body of work alone, let alone crime and detective fiction in general, Phillip Laszio stands tall. The man appears to have made it his hobby to betray, backstab, insult, steal from and otherwise annoy as many thin-skinned, hot-tempered egotists as humanly possible, to the point where it's barely a spoiler to identify him as the victim. The scene where Jerome Berin meets Wolfe and begins to rant about him is basically establishing why not just Berin but practically every other supporting character in the novel has a motive to whack him. Somewhat ironically, however, the murder has nothing to do with any of these more-or-less petty grievances, and is instead an act of cold-blooded murder based on a combination of a business dispute and an affair.
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Too Many Cooks / int_90b66e22	type	Femme Fatale
Too Many Cooks / int_90b66e22	comment	Femme Fatale: Dina Laszio. Former wife of Marko Vukcic, current wife of Phillip Laszio, and all over a sultry kind of dame who, in between trying to get her claws back into her former husband, tends to slink about the place being all seductively mysterious, morally ambiguous and vaguely sinister while trying to seem like such a helpless ingenue who just needs a big strong man to help her. She's also plotting with Raymond Liggett to murder her husband, and Wolfe suggests she was the primary mover behind the crime.
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Too Many Cooks / int_94332264	type	Busman's Holiday
Too Many Cooks / int_94332264	comment	Busman's Holiday: The one time he leaves his house for a vacation resort, Nero Wolfe still ends up investigating a murder.
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Too Many Cooks / int_967856d8	type	Hired to Hunt Yourself
Too Many Cooks / int_967856d8	comment	Hired to Hunt Yourself: When Archie is assigned to help Crisler the house detective find out whose been throwing rocks at a guest, he quickly deduces that the detective has been doing it out of both revenge (over the guest trying to get him fired after Crisler caught the man's chauffeur stealing grease) and to make the guy shut up due to wanting Crisler to catch his mysterious assailant. Archie finds the whole thing hilarious, and doesn't blow his cover (at least not to the hotel manager or the guest).
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Too Many Cooks / int_a0db7803	type	It's Personal
Too Many Cooks / int_a0db7803	comment	It's Personal: Wolfe treats the case like just another job for most of the story, and decides that he's done with it after demonstrating Jerome Berin's innocence. Then the killer gets a fit of paranoia and decides that Wolfe has to be silenced. One narrow miss with a gunshot later, Wolfe's out for blood.
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Too Many Cooks / int_a201dad2	type	Passive-Aggressive Kombat
Too Many Cooks / int_a201dad2	comment	Passive-Aggressive Kombat: This initially comes up in the discussion between Wolfe and the African-American serving staff (and is heavily implied to be the norm at Kanawha Spa, though it goes unnoticed by the majority of the white people around); they're very consciously respectful to him, but in a way that clearly articulates their mistrust of him and that their respect is largely a result of the racial expectations of the time. Paul Whipple, in particular, makes it clear that referring to Wolfe as "sir" is like having his teeth pulled. Wolfe cuts through the BS and earns their genuine respect simply by talking to them as men rather than as a white man expecting deference from his racial "inferiors". For example, he responds to Whipple being forced to refer to him as "sir" with:
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Too Many Cooks / int_a39d6056	type	NiceToTheWaiter
Too Many Cooks / int_a39d6056	comment	Nice to the Waiter: Wolfe makes a key breakthrough in the case when he gathers the black kitchen staff together to request information with significantly more respect than they're accustomed to receiving from white guests.
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Too Many Cooks / int_a70223	type	Karma Houdini
Too Many Cooks / int_a70223	comment	Karma Houdini: A likely case, though ambiguous. Dina Laszio fingers Raymond Liggett as the mastermind behind her husband's murder in order to avoid punishment, though Wolfe suspects and it's heavily implied that she was really the one in charge.
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Too Many Cooks / int_a7acd9aa	type	ChekhovsLecture
Too Many Cooks / int_a7acd9aa	comment	Chekhov's Lecture: During Wolfe's conversation with Jerome Berin on the train to West Virginia, Berin mentions dining at New York's Hotel Churchill in the Resort Room, a room where the waiters are dressed in the livery of famous resorts from around the world, including the Kanawha Spa. Raymond Liggett used that duplicate livery to disguise himself as a member of the Kanawha Spa staff to commit the murder, and Wolfe suggests that the Resort Room inspired the method of carrying out the killing.
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Too Many Cooks / int_acf33d00	type	Nice Job Fixing It, Villain
Too Many Cooks / int_acf33d00	comment	Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Wolfe's only real interest throughout most of the book is clearing Jerome Berin, and after doing that he was perfectly happy to sit back and let the killer go unfound if the police were unable to find him or her. Then the killer gets paranoid and tries to shoot Wolfe... which leads to Wolfe, infuriated, deciding to expose the killer.
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Too Many Cooks / int_be192f18	comment	Yes-Man: One of the methods Wolfe uses to try and get the recipe for Berin's sausages is, to Archie's disgust, shameless sucking up. Albert Malfi desperately wants to become part of Les Quinze MaÃ®tres, but apparently lacks the talent for membership. Archie is therefore rather amused to note that he appears to have decided that if he can't get in by skill, he'll try shameless fawning to the members instead.
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Too Many Cooks / int_d259fea2	type	Speak Ill of the Dead
Too Many Cooks / int_d259fea2	comment	Speak Ill of the Dead: Laszio's death does little to ward off the scorn for him.
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Too Many Cooks / int_d39e327f	type	What the Hell, Hero?
Too Many Cooks / int_d39e327f	comment	What the Hell, Hero?: For a given value of "hero" (he's on the side of law and order but is kind of a pompous and slightly racist jerk), but at one point Barry Tolman informs Wolfe of everyone's whereabouts during the murder, and brings up Constanza Berin's absence "only to have the record complete." Archie, who knows for a fact that Constanza was absent because she was crying in her room after an argument she'd had with her father about Tolman, isn't impressed by the officious way in which Tolman brings her up and delivers one of these in his internal monologue:
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Too Many Cooks / int_eb8ec7c8	type	Jerkass
Too Many Cooks / int_eb8ec7c8	comment	Jerkass: Phillip Laszio. The local sheriff is also vehemently racist, fairly hostile towards Wolfe, and contributes little to the case.
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Too Many Cooks / int_f23ad6de	type	Food Porn
Too Many Cooks / int_f23ad6de	comment	Food Porn: Naturally, given the setting and guest cast. In particular, the penultimate chapter describes the MaÃ®tres' feast in great detail. Nero does it himself early on, describing some American dishes in glowing, poetic terms to refute Jerome Berin—who'd said America hadn't contributed anything to haute cuisine. He's eloquent enough to make a reader catch a craving.
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

	Too Many Cooks	hasFeature	Hired to Hunt Yourself / int_e59e2ea5
	Too Many Cooks	hasFeature	Summation Gathering / int_e59e2ea5

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