A Certain Hunger

The American writer Chelsea G. Summers made her debut with A Certain Hunger, which Unnamed Press issued in print on 1 December 2020. It is the first-person account of Dorothy Daniels, a successful food writer who is also a serial killer, and it was written in the voice of a narrator addressing the reader directly from a prison cell.

Dorothy reviews restaurants for a living and is better at it than most of the chefs she writes about: meticulous, clever and never satisfied by what is put in front of her. She moves between Manhattan and Italy, likes sex as much as she likes food, and has never found a partner who lasts. Something she has kept in check for years stops being in check, and the book follows what she does with it.

The novel is written as a confession, so the reader knows from the start what she has done. Summers uses the language of restaurant criticism for the rest of it.

It is a standalone novel rather than the first of a series, and the narrator's account covers her life before prison as well as the crimes. The book is a first novel.