[I received an electronic review copy of this book from Netgalley and Berkley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.]
Summary
Nell Valenti has arrived in Italy for the opportunity of a lifetime. She’s there to work with the legendary Chef, Claudio Orlandini, her culinary hero.
Nell has been hired to take Villa Orlandini and turn it into a culinary school where tourists could come and learn from the famous chef. She would make any structural and equipment changes necessary, design a course of study, and promote the school. But the villa is not exactly in tip top shape. And neither is Chef Orlandini.
The Chef might be the big name draw, but he seems to play bocce more than he cooks these days. Parts of the villa look run down with old, worn, and mismatched furniture. There’s even a porcupine living in one of the rooms. Nell has a much larger job ahead of her than she had been led to believe.
Before she can really wrap her mind around all the work that needs to be done to transform the space into a cooking school, the occupants of the villa inform her they are throwing a dinner party to help with the launch of the school. But when someone is killed and Chef disappears, Nell has to wonder if the school even has a chance.
Review
I struggled with this one. I didn’t click with the characters or the story in a way that propelled me forward. It was too easy to set this down and pick up other books instead. I didn’t get a good sense of the cooking school pieces or Nell’s expertise to pull that off. The author tried to set up some interesting dynamics with Nell’s family, but it was more tell than show until the last part of the book. It didn’t have a chance to grow into all it could have been. And while it’s obvious that a story in Italy is going to have Italian-speaking characters and translation issues, this was often a distraction or interruption to the flow of the story for me.
There’s potential here. Nell seems to have an interesting background. I liked the potential love interest and the way he and Nell interacted. The setting – the villa, the cooking school angle – could be developed nicely. Personally, though, this didn’t click. I didn’t get a great sense of the victim, the suspects, or the larger group at the villa. Characters are a huge part of books and reading for me, and these didn’t draw me in.
The mystery is solid, and I enjoyed some of the latter scenes in the book where Nell works through some clues. I might try a second book in this series to see how the characters develop, especially if Nell’s parents are going to be part of the story. That dynamic is fascinating to me.