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A Babe Stern Mystery
by Peter Lewis

Paperback: 320 pages; Publisher: Counterpoint (August 1, 2010); Language: English; ISBN-10: 1582435480; ISBN-13: 978-1582435480
You can buy Dead in the Dregs: A Babe Stern Mystery at Amazon
Prominent wine critic Richard Wilson makes a living elevating and destroying winemakers’ reputations with the stroke of his pen. When he disappears after a tasting at Napa Valley’s Norton Winery, his sister Janie looks to her ex-husband Babe Stern for help. But when Wilson’s body is found floating in a vat at Norton, Stern’s search turns into a hunt for the killer. Working with the Napa Valley police, Stern quickly finds a string of suspects, all with one thing in common: their desire to get revenge for the reviews that shattered their wines and livelihoods. But as the police work to quickly clear the case, those same suspects have a string of alibis and the trail begins to fade.
Stern digs further into the circumstances of Wilson’s death and finds himself following his only lead, to Burgundy, France. In cellars and tasting rooms from Beaune to Nuits-Saint-Georges, Stern tracks the troubled son of a family of vignerons, one of the few people in the winery the night Wilson died. But the wine families of the Côte d’Or are secretive and entangled, and the further Stern goes to discover the truth, the more he becomes the ultimate target. In a stunning debut mystery packed with revenge and murder, Stern’s only choice is to find the truth.
EXCERPT
They brought the harvest in early that year in Napa, and with it, Richard Wilson’s body. A perfect flowering, a mild spring dotted with just the right amount of rain, and a hot, dry summer had ripened the fruit to twenty-eight brix by late August. Wilson’s selection, on the other hand, had nothing to do with how sweet he was.
The bar was always dead that time of year. The whole world, it seemed, was out picking. I dreaded going to work, but I dragged my ass down the mountain and opened the place. I did the books from the night before and swept up. A few customers wandered in, guys too old to stoop in a vineyard for ten hours straight in ninety-degree heat. By three o’clock, we had done a staggering twelve dollars and sixty-three cents.
I’ll never forget that day. It was the first time I had seen Wilson in more than a decade and it was the last day I would see him alive.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter Lewis is a successful restaurateur and restaurant industry consultant. He has been a contributing editor for Virtuoso Travel & Life, for which he wrote the column “Wine Country Notebook.” His work has also appeared in Pacific Northwest and Arcade. Dead in the Dregs is his first novel. He lives in Seattle.
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