Bitter Rind

About Bitter Rind

It is January on Lago d'Orta, and the small Piedmontese lake town is the kind of quiet that only January delivers — the piazza empty, the trattoria half-lit, the island monastery holding its position against the winter water. Sylvie Maren is there to audit a villa with an exceptional kitchen and a supply chain she is professionally required to examine. On her first evening, before she has fully unpacked, a woman is found dead in the wine cellar.

The woman was a food journalist. She had been asking questions about the cheese. The dead journalist, it becomes clear, had nearly completed an exposé that would unravel a DOP certification fraud reaching through the local consortium and into the community's most trusted institutions.

She can no longer publish it. Sylvie, working from the fragments of an investigation she didn't conduct, sets out to reconstruct what the journalist found — through village conversations, supplier records, and a careful arithmetic that reveals the gap between what the labels say and what the product actually is. It is, in form, exactly the work she does every day.

The difference is that someone has already killed once to prevent it.