'I had a s**tload of credit cards I kept maxing out - whatever it took to keep the restaurant going until the Australian people realised what we were trying to do.'Īt the time, he was hot off a job as Penfolds' head chef and was highly respected on the culinary scene.ĭespite running at a $360,000 loss in that first year, 2014 saw a turn of the tide and the bookings started rolling in - until Covid hit. 'It was so expensive to run,' he wrote in his memoir. He had just enough money to pay the overheads for two weeks.

On opening night, not a single diner came, despite glittering reviews from critics a week earlier. The Scarlet Flush, originally published in 1963, is hands down one of my favorite Carter Brown books and well worth tracking down.He'd been scouring potential locations for the restaurant and workshopping new recipes for his cookbook, which was in development with the backing of Simon and Schuster There's even a crafty twist involving Kluger's wife I didn't see coming. While the criminal element itself plays out in page turning anticipation. Every woman Farrell encounters (bar one, I should mention) is gorgeous and willing to drop their inhibitions as quickly as they are to drop love laced one liners. The Scarlet Flush is cheesy and entertaining.

Sure, he just happens to 'look' like Kluger, but can he pull of 'being' Kluger in order to find where the hidden diamonds have been stashed all these years? The kicker - she's also got a proposal that'll not only clear Mikes' debt but leave him twenty thousand dollars richer.Īll Mike has to do is impersonate Mike Kluger, a jewel thief who is due to return home to a lovely and lonely wife after seven years in prison. Soon he's hustled into a back office by a couple of heavies thinking he's about to get a beating, only to be confronted by a dame to kill for a curvy blonde with a heart-shaped face and a body that draws the eye in all the right places. Putting all he has on 0 at the roulette wheel in a last chance high risk, high reward stake he nails the risk but not the reward. Down on his luck and in debt to the house for over ten thousand dollars, gambler Mike Farrell finds himself staring at a bottomless pit one that sucks the cash and life right out of him.

The Scarlet Flush by Carter Brown