A Serving of Scandal

Kate McKinnon is thirty-six and mother to Toby. She used to be a restaurant chef but that all stopped when Toby - now five - came along and changed everything. Now she has a small but thriving business catering for private clients, companies and some government departments. Her life is on an even keel.

Then she gets a job cooking lunch at the Foreign Office and has her first fateful meeting with Oliver Stapler, Secretary of State. He’s married and a father and totally out of bounds, yet she falls for him. She thinks she’s hiding it beautifully, but there are people who would like to see her fail and to them her feelings are all too transparent.

When someone alerts the gutter press, who cares whether Kate’s affair with Oliver is true or not? It’s a great story and will shift a ton of newspapers - and destroy several lives at the same time.

As a cook, restaurateur, food writer and business woman, PRUE LEITH has played a key role in the revolution of Britain’s eating habits since the sixties. In 1995, having published twelve cookbooks, she gave up writing about food to concentrate on fiction. A Serving of Scandal is her fifth novel. She lives in London and Oxfordshire.