The fluffy tone of Little Indiscretions (Random House, $23.95), which won Spain’s Planeta Prize for Carmen Posadas in 1998, is just the melt-in-your-mouth frosting on an otherwise tart -- and surprisingly substantial -- comic mystery about the perils of gossip. When the body of Nestor Chaffino, a pastry chef ‘‘renowned for his masterful way with a chocolate fondant,’’ is discovered in the freezer of the estate on the Costa del Sol where his company is catering a dinner, everyone gives up a shout: ‘‘Thank God for household accidents!’’ But was it really an accident? It seems as if Nestor was writing an expose of his rich clients’ foibles, some of them well worth the price of murder to suppress. Posadas’s whimsical style, which holds its humor in Christopher Andrews’s airy translation from the Spanish, gives her story the charms of any lightweight whodunit. But her characters’ secrets are truly dark, and the irony is heavier than any souffle that Nestor would ever whip up.

Once in a while, a book comes along that is sheer delight. Such is Little Indiscretions, by Carmen Posadas, translated from the Spanish by Christopher Andrews (Random House, $23.95). Winner of Spain’s Planeta Prize, this slender novel has it all: an elegant setting, a taut time frame, a cast of intriguing characters and beautifully crafted writing that lends both glamour and insight to the tale.
The story begins late at night when chef Nestor Chaffinno wraps up a successful dinner party by storing his beloved truffles in the client’s walk-in freezer. Without warning, the door clicks shut behind him, condemning him to a slow and very cold death. As he thinks back over the weeks preceding his murder, we learn that this meticulously mannered chef knows many secrets, both about exquisite cooking and the lives of the dinner guests. His thoughts supply a lively backdrop for the story that follows, introducing characters and motivations.
Posadas then takes us into the heads of each of the main suspects. We meet Nestor’s assistant, a Czech body builder who is sometimes perplexed by but always accepting of the strange ways of Western Europe; a well-respected judge whose wife has recently died, pitching him into the path of a temptation he thought he had beaten decades ago; a successful art dealer whose current respectability masks a shady past involving Argentina’s nastiest political era; a spoiled little rich girl who thinks that multiple body piercings will help erase the pain of her brother’s too-early death; and an aging society beauty whose icy control of her world is threatening to melt in the face of an unexpected, forbidden love. The characters in turn reveal their pasts, their dreams, their transgressions and their fears layer by layer as the book moves steadily toward its climax. Posadas never makes a misstep with these characters, despite wide disparities in their ages and backgrounds.
Best of all, the story is set against a slightly exaggerated, sensual Madrid, a place where fortune tellers possess real powers of prophecy, wear tiny brocaded slippers fit for an empress and have faces that seem to shift in shape; where nightclubs close at 3 a.m., then open back up again in minutes, transformed for a mysterious, nocturnal crowd; where love of any persuasion can be satisfied behind closed doors for the right price; and, most of all, a place were secrets kept for years have a way of coming out in the end.
The finale of the book makes this abundantly clear. The chef’s murder emerges as ironic, and the solution seems deceptively simple -- until the reader slowly realizes its implications. You may find yourself closing the book to conduct a mental inventory of your past sins as you are forced to acknowledge that secrets have a way of betraying even those who resolutely keep them.
Special mention must be made of the book’s translator, Christopher Andrews, for preserving the cadences of Posadas’s prose without sacrificing her rich nuances.
Katy Munger is working on her 10th crime novel.

The death of a manipulative, mischievous pastry chef sets the stage for this insouciant whodunit, with its humorous and philosophical narrative voice, from Spanish author Carmen Posadas. When the frozen body of Nestor Chaffino, who had been hired to cater a party at art dealer Ernesto Teldi’s Costa del Sol summer house, turns up in the kitchen “cool room” the morning of the party, the evidence, including a nonworking alarm button in the freezer, points to murder. And why was the victim clutching a scrap of paper with a fragmentary list of dessert recipes? In a series of flashbacks, the author adroitly lays out the “little indiscretions,” adulterous and otherwise (recorded by the conniving Nestor in his moleskin notebook), that bind Ernesto, his wife, a naïve young Czech kitchen helper, a renegade waitress, a widowed judge and various other distinctive and unusual characters. The action proceeds with all the inevitability of a Greek tragedy to a denouement both hilarious and horrifying. (Aug. 19)
Little Indiscretions won the 1998 Planeta Prize, topped bestseller lists and sold more than half a million copies in Spain. Born in Uruguay, the author now lives in Madrid.

Famous pastry chef Nestor Chaffino would still be alive if he’d stuck to writing recipes and cooking hints in his pristine little ?notebook. But he didn’t, so someone locked him in cold storage with his chocolate truffles. Whodunit? Any one of the quirky characters could have killed the keeper of secrets, both culinary and personal-the odd but omniscient clairvoyant; Nestor’s Czech body-building assistant; his young helper; the man with the old-fashioned military crew cut; or even the owner of the house where Nestor was frozen alive. This is murder spiced with humor, stirred with a light touch, and served up in a deft translation. Originally published in Spain as Pequeñas Infamias, this book won top honors with the Planeta Award for literature in 1998. This is an excellent addition in both English and Spanish for libraries of all sizes. The author, who has won prizes for her children’s books, also writes for film and television and lives in Madrid.

A secret-hoarding caterer is frozen to death inside a wealthy client’s walk-in freezer: an English-translation debut that sounds like, but emphatically isn’t, a case for Hercule Poirot. Nor for any other fictional detective either, since children’s author Posadas begins her story with its ending: The night peerless pastry cook Nestor Chaffino’s natural buoyancy turns to peevishness and finally terror when he finds himself locked inside the cold room at the Lilies, Ernesto Teldi’s house on the Costa del Sol. Instead of unleashing a sleuth, Posadas charts the gravely wacky incidents that led up to Nestor’s final frozen dessert and the secrets he collected along with his prized recipes. Which of them led to his murder? Was it something he knew about the checkered career of Ernesto Teldi before he settled into the safe groove of an art dealer? Or about the suicide years ago of Adela Teldi’s sister Soledad during an intimate visit to her sister and her brother-in-law? Or about the motorcycle death years before that of Eddie Trias, whose grieving sister Chloe survived to become Nestor’s unpaid kitchen hand and his waiter Carlos Garcia’s lover? Or about the incorrigible fondness Ernesto’s friend, the magistrate Serafin Tous, has for beautiful young men? Or about the clairvoyant Madame Longstaffe’s advice to Carlos about how to find his love and her prediction that Nestor didn’t have to worry about the lung cancer he was convinced would kill him? It all sounds very mysterious, but Posadas is writing a pastiche rather than a whodunit, beginning with the twist that the “little indiscretions” Nestor prizes so highly really are cooking secrets rather than his friends’ dirty laundry. Arch concept humor, deliberately paced yet weirdly discordant—exactly the sort of thing that will appeal to readers who like that sort of thing, as half a million readers in 12 languages reportedly have so far.

This elegant mystery, which won the 1998 Planeta Prize in Barcelona, has as many secrets as one of the murder victim’s chocolate fondants. Nestor, a pastry chef with a penchant for other people’s hidden desires, freezes to death in the walk-in cold room where he has just catered a party for Ernesto Teldi, an art collector on the Costa del Sol. Ernesto, his wife, Adela, Nestor’s twisted young employee Chloe, and Serafin, an old friend of the Teldis, all have secrets that Nestor has discovered. His appearance at the party causes much fear and loathing--but who locks that freezer door? Serpentine sentences about childhood memories and furtive desires wrestle with verbal flourishes as light as a random caress. Utterly European in its aristocratic air, and great fun to read even though Nestor’s recipes are tantalizingly incomplete.