Featured image- Pic of author by Dennis Drenner.
A fission and fusion of fashion and crime fiction, Barbara Bourland’s I’LL EAT WHEN I’M DEAD is a ferociously funny satire of the gloss and goss industry.
Rip the dust jacket from the binding and wear it with pride, you’ll want to devour this delicious banquet of a book in one sitting, gutsing the glorious barbs and bon mots, characters and situations.
Plot thickens, narrative ripens under the impressive prose of Ms Bourland, with this scathing, coruscating and laugh out loud novel.
With diabolic deftness, Bourland has created her own magazine for cohorts to splash about in. The devil is in the detail and devil swears pravda!
Rage Fashion Book is the bible of Haute Couture, the gospel of goos and unguents, the creed of cosmetics, the proselytiser of perfumes, the first and final word on fashion in all its manifestations.
Ace editor, Cat Ono is the focus of this hocus pocus and the focus of a macabre homicide case when her boss, Hilary Whitney, is found dead, seemingly having starved to death.
It also seems to everyone that two months after the event that the ripple of her death had run its course.
Naturally, they were wrong.
Hilary’s brother finds a postcard sent by the deceased with a cryptic message – “the ribbon is the key to everything”. It’s enough for hunky homicide dick, Hutton, to go a huntin’ and his first interview is with Cat Ono. It’s lust lighting at first sighting, which would be just fine if it didn’t complicate matters of due process, prudence and probity.
Further complications arise and abound with Hutton’s long time fuck buddy, Callie, finally busting out as a career model. In between modelling gigs she’s been tending bar at Cat’s favourite watering holes.
Erogenous zone breached, its a headlong slide into the erroneous zones as the investigator and his informant track a conspiracy of fatally fetishising commodities, perilous to the pursuit of beautiful bodies.
Boss bitch lipstick capitalism that bankrupts women both financially and morally is the target here and the aim is true.
While all the characters are worthy of their own books, Cat is a creation to be truly savoured – savvy, sassy, brazen and bold, this Belgian born dynamo is conflicted and flawed yet fundamentally courageous and smart.
I’LL EAT WHEN I’M DEAD is the sort of read we are all too often starved of – an entertaining romp with a brain and a heart.
Read it and feed.
I’LL EAT WHEN I’M DEAD by Barbara Bourland is published by Hachette Australia.