Cooking is Angie Amalfi’s life – though she’s still looking for some way to actually make a living at it. Desperate for any sort of culinary career, she fast-talks her way into a radio job, working for a pompous, third-rate chef who has a call-in talk show. It’s a hot new opportunity for Angie, the perfect complement to her red hot romance with handsome San Francisco homicide detective Paavo Smith. But solving the mysterious death of a competing restaurateur suddenly seems a lot more interesting to Angie than trying to make her windbag boss sound good. Now all she has to do is figure out some way to stand the heat and stay in the kitchen – while staying alive in the process!
When surfing radio channels one day, Angie finds a cooking show on KYME radio, and she listens to Chef Henri, appalled. He is so bad at the advice he gives his listeners. He really needs her! So she corners him the next day, and talks her way into her new job. She will screen his calls for him, and then quickly look up the answers to the questions that will be asked. But things don’t really work out as well as Angie imagined.
Then one of the latest hot chefs is found dead up in the mountains, and Angie just cannot believe it was an accident, or suicide as the police thinks. So when she talks to Paavo about it, she rises enough suspicions in him, to check it out. And the man has been poisoned, and then dumped. So now Paavo has to question other restaurateurs, and people working at their restaurants to find a possible motive, other than the fact everyone just hated the guy. But Angie can help him, because now he is in her world. She knows everyone there, and give him back ground information.
Everyone keeps telling Paavo that Angie is bad for him, only playing with him, trying to live dangerously for a while, they just don’t fit, come from different worlds. And Paavo is starting to believe him. How could Angie ever really love him? No one did before … So he is trying to keep Angie at arms length, to stop seeing her. But Angie is stubborn, and won’t give up on him that easily. She keeps popping up in his investigation, and when she is in danger, his eyes really open.
But trying to solve this case, Paavo meets an old acquaintance, the murderer of his big sister, 20 years ago. He couldn’t prove it when he was a little boy, he cannot prove it now either. Nor the murder of another girl more recently. And when he is closing in, the man just ups and leaves town without a trace. But Paavo will never give up now. After all, the man also threatened Angie.
Angie finally gives up on Paavo, she just needs more from him than he is willing to give. She leaves her apartment to go home to her parents luxurious house, trying to get on with her life, to date another guy. And when Paavo sees that, he just can’t let her leave him standing there like that. He finally admits he loves her too, and that was all Angie was waiting for to hear to forgive him.
So in the end, it is Angie who finds the clues, but Paavo keeps saving her.
I still doubt this is a cozy mystery, too big a part is for Paavo and his colleagues. But I liked it nonetheless, and will read more of this series soon.
I am having a couple days of, so that means plenty of time to read. And there are some real jewels waiting for me to pick them up. Just to choose, that is the difficult part. But read my blog, and you will find out.
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