Jeremy Papier, the new Alice Waters of the Vancouver food world, is fast becoming known for his radically rear-guard cuisine — tradition-steeped dishes that celebrate the bounty of the Pacific Northwest. His restaurant, The Monkey's Paw Bistro, is always fully booked, but, unfortunately, it's more an artistic triumph than a reasonably run business. Far too costly ever to turn a profit, it is kited by Jeremy on dozens of maxed-out credit cards. An old family friend, Dante Beale, owner of a worldwide chain of cookie-cutter coffeehouses, is willing to bail the restaurant out — for the price of sole control. It's a business proposition made in hell, one strenuously opposed by Jeremy's pretty young sous chef, the incorruptible, plainspoken Jules. Jeremy's problems deepen when his eccentric-academic father — a "participatory anthropologist" half Joseph Mitchell, half Joe Gould — loses himself among the homeless in Vancouver's Stanley Park. He lives as they do (he's especially adept at catching and roasting sparrows) and soon involves Jeremy in researching a "cold case" crime, the true-life murder of two children slain in the park in the early 1970's.

Timothy Taylor — the writer who "everyone in the Canadian literary community today is talking about" (Globe and Mail) — weaves together the disparate, brightly colored strands of his story with unerring skill and unflagging comic invention. Stanley Park, already a Canadian best seller, is a comic novel of the first order — and a memorable literary debut.

"This delicious first novel must be savored." Toronto Globe and Mail

"Your mouth waters as you read Timothy Taylor's first novel...In Stanley Park, he does for the restaurant business what John le Carré does for spying; he makes it alluring. And he does for food what Patrick Suskind does for perfume; he makes it exciting." National Post

"Timothy Taylor writes straight, strong, unadorned prose...He's well in command of his material, writes great dialogue, keeps his story, yes, cooking. Stanley Park...thrums with a powerful sense of the city, urban surfaces as well as primal currents. Also food...textures and tangs, colors and sensations." Quill & Quire

A love story wrapped in a murder mystery.