The Death and Life of August Sweeney by Samuel Ashworth

On the night he dies, August Sweeney is just pulling himself out of the weeds in the restaurant that was supposed to be his comeback. An immense man of immense appetites, August worked his way up from the bowels of a greasy spoon in Queens to international culinary stardom, and his fall, when it came, left a crater visible from space. When Dr. Maya Zhu, a guarded, intense autopsist, is summoned to investigate, she discovers she must operate under strict conditions Sweeney himself dictated before he died. Over the course of a single day, Zhu's fate becomes forever tied to Sweeney's, and her life, and his death, will change in ways she never imagined.