Secret Dinner

Raphael Montes

IF any hint of cannibalism is OFF your reading menu, then the thought of devouring this deliciously dark and twisted tongue-in-cheek comedy thriller – set in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro’s famous holiday mecca – might well not tickle your taste buds.

But you would be missing a treat because Secret Dinner, from the internationally acclaimed and bestselling Brazilian author Raphael Montes, established him as one of the most compelling voices in contemporary crime fiction… and now, thanks to a brilliant translation by Zoë Perry, it is available for the first time in English.

Employing a wickedly clever and insanely imaginative mixing bowl of gallows humour, good, old-fashioned filmic horror, and a satirical exploration of ‘foodie’ culture and its accompanying monetary excesses, Montes (pictured below) brings us four childhood friends who have swapped rural Brazil for an apartment in Copacabana and cook up a devilish plan to pay for their expensive new lives. After two years of cramming for a university in Rio, Dante and his three best friends, Piglet, Miguel and Hugo, decide the time has come to swap their small town in rural Brazil – mostly known for its religious tourism – for a shared apartment in Copacabana.

The pals are just your average students, thinking of the endless possibilities, excited about the bright future now at their fingertips, and trying to make ends meet with part-time jobs. But Rio de Janeiro is not the easiest place to live and when their rent skyrockets, they struggle to keep their new lives and big dreams afloat.

They soon realise that to keep their apartment, they need to make money however they can. And when a kind gesture turns rotten, it becomes urgent that Dante and his crew figure out a way to make money… and make it fast.

The answer would seem to lie in a new website offering authentic dinners to foreign travellers and Rio’s filthy rich. That surely can’t be too difficult but, sucked into a dark web of secret dinner parties catering to twisted fantasies, their joke addition to one of the menus sees them make all the money they need in one night.

And what starts as a culinary prank quickly spirals out of control as the stakes get higher, the consequences become deadlier, and the twisted depths that lurk within each of them are brutally exposed. And when the criminal underworld closes around them, and threatens not only their friendship but also their lives, Dante is faced with a question he never thought possible… how much money is enough to stop cooking human flesh?

Montes is not afraid to flesh out his own suspense-packed, blood-and-guts thriller with some truly stomach-churning and macabre scenes, but it is all served with up with a dry smirk and leavened by undeniably hilarious laugh-out-loud moments as we track the four friends in some of Rio’s shadiest corners. Much of the fast-moving story’s momentum comes from the almost inevitable fraying of the four men’s friendship and discovering whether their increasingly bold and bloody menu, along with their ultimate descent into human depravity, will finally be the death knell for both them and their money-making venture.

But the journey to the book’s final course is paved with some fascinating moral conundrums and social dilemmas as Montes explores the characters, consciences and motivations of the men, revealing the lengths that some – even those who are not inherently villainous – are prepared to take in pursuit of money and the fulfilment of longed-for dreams and desires.

There is betrayal here, greed, ambition, desperation and deceit, and plenty of weighty emotional questions to conjure with, but it is surely the mind-blowing twist in the tail that finally knocks the reader for six with much the same power as the author’s bone-crunching satire. Food for thought in every sense of the word!
(Zaffre, paperback, £14.99)