Excerpt Brief: The Secret Dinner by Raphael Montes

# What this excerpt does

The excerpt published on CrimeReads introduces The Secret Dinner through an intimate first-person voice. Dante speaks directly to the reader, asking to be remembered even after the reader judges him. That opening line sets a confessional tone: the narrator frames himself as someone who was once "a nice guy" and who will explain how his life unraveled.

# Core setup

A late-night game revolving around a logic riddle about seagull meat becomes the thematic hinge of the excerpt. The riddle concerns a man who eats what he believes is seagull meat, later discovers the truth about what he ate, and kills himself. Dante repeats this scenario to his friends and guides them through yes/no/irrelevant questioning until the full, grim answer emerges.

# What the riddle does in the narrative

The riddle does three things in the excerpt:

• It frames the narrator's moral curiosity: Dante fixates not on the tragedy itself but on the idea that someone could eat human flesh unknowingly and enjoy it.
• It foreshadows the novel's central conceit: private meals for elites featuring a "very special (and highly illicit) ingredient." The riddle makes the reader consider transgression, taste, memory, and guilt before the plot fully supplies its mechanics.

# Character and context details to note

• Miguel, Hugo, Piglet: Dante's close friends and former roommates in Rio. Hugo's culinary training is relevant to food-centered plot elements.
• Hilda: Dante's mother, whose presence at Dante's move suggests ongoing familial influence.
• Setting: Rio de Janeiro, with an early scene set near Copacabana and a specific moment in March 2023 that the narrator recalls as a night that keeps returning to him.

# Tone and reader expectations

The excerpt positions the reader to expect a thriller that mixes social climbing, food culture, and moral transgression. The voice is conversational and confessional, alternating between casual scenes—pizza and pitchers of beer—and the later revelation of darker curiosities. The narrative method drops a puzzle at the center of the scene so the reader is primed to watch how intellectual curiosity and social circumstance might lead to criminal enterprise.

# Why the opening matters

The opening compacts character, motive, and inciting fascination into a short set of scenes. By ending the excerpt on Dante's obsession with the riddle's implication—humans eating human flesh without knowing it—the text sets the emotional logic behind the group's later decision to cater forbidden meals. Readers who follow the excerpt get both a psychological clue about the narrator and a thematic lens through which to read the rest of the book.