No Accounting for Taste

Julia Kerrigan has done everything that was asked of her, in order, on time, for twenty-five years.She runs the programs at a small Chicago nonprofit, which in practice means she runs the nonprofit. She's the one who remembers, the one who fixes it, the one whose name is on nothing. When the job she's effectively been doing for three years goes to a stranger from Minneapolis, she walks home the wrong way and finds a used bookstore open at ten at night.The woman behind the register holds a tin under her nose and asks what she smells.On the other side of that shop is an empire built on flavor - houses named for spices, fortunes resting on nine sealed jars that decide what a thing is supposed to taste like. For four hundred years it has been looking for a palate that cannot be flattered. A mouth with a hole in it. An instrument that gets one specific thing wrong.Julia has one. Cilantro tastes like soap to her.It makes her the most valuable woman on eight worlds and the least safe. One of those jars has been quietly, profitably wrong for a hundred and forty-one years, and the house that owns it would rather she didn't mention it.And the quiet man from that awful night in River North - wrong shirt, no one had heard of him - turns out to be a duke who came to Earth for exactly the thing she is trying to escape.She wants his life. He wants an ordinary Tuesday. Only one of them can have it.No Accounting for Taste is the first book in the Gatekeeper series.