In 1906, at a prosperous Long Island summer home, a family falls ill and typhoid is diagnosed. When Dr George Soper is called in to find the source of the contagion, he notices that the household cook has gone missing. She is Mary Mallon, the woman who would become known as Typhoid Mary. Soper, sanitary engineer turned sleuth, sees Mary as his Moriarty. He finds there has been an outbreak of typhoid fever in every household she has worked in over the past decade. Mary is a 'carrier', a seemingly healthy individual who passes on her dangerous germs, sometimes with fatal consequences. Now Soper must hunt the cook down before she can infect more unsuspecting victims. A poor Irish immigrant, Mary refuses to believe that she can harbour typhoid in her strong and healthy body, and she doesn't intend to go quietly. In this fascinating true story Bourdain, in an homage from one cook to another, follows Mary through the kitchens of New York, putting a human face to a desperate and unintentional murderer, and examines a time, and a life, with his inimitable style.

'What Jean Genet was to the prison, what Tom Waits is to the lowlife bar, Bourdain is to the restaurant kitchen: a charmingly roguish guide to a tough, grimy underworld with its own particular rules and rituals ... a tale of hot pursuit, with the rude gusto and barbed wit that made Kitchen Confidential such a full-bodied pleasure' New York Times Book Review 'Raw, readable prose' Entertainment Weekly 'Bourdain's prose is utterly riveting' New York Magazine 'A juicy drama ... Bourdain creates a varied historical portrait of Mallon's time' Seattle Times

Anthony Bourdain is the executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles in New York City. He is also the author of the novels The Bobby Gold Stories, Gone Bamboo and Bone in the Throat, plus the bestselling books Kitchen Confidential and A Cook's Tour. His latest book is Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook, published by Bloomsbury in October 2004.