Death al Dente

Food Lovers' Village Mystery Series, Book 1

By: Leslie Budewitz

Narrated by: Rebecca Mitchell

The town of Jewel Bay, Montana - known as a Food Lovers' Village - is obsessed with homegrown and homemade Montana fare. So when Erin Murphy takes over her family's century-old general store, she turns it into a boutique market filled with local delicacies. But Erin's freshly booming business might go rotten when a former employee turns up dead.

Murphy's Mercantile, known as the Merc, has been a staple in Jewel Bay for over 100 years. To celebrate their recent makeover as a gourmet food market, Erin has organized a town festival, Festa di Pasta, featuring the culinary goods of Jewel Bay's finest - including her mother Fresca's delicious Italian specialties. But Erin's sweet success is soured when the shop's former manager, Claudette, is found dead behind the Merc on the Festa's opening night. With rival chef James Angelo stirring up rumors that Fresca's sauce recipes were stolen from Claudette, Erin's mother is under close scrutiny. Now Erin will have to hunt down some new suspects, or both her family and her store might wind up in hot water.

©2013 Leslie Ann Budewitz (P)2017 Tantor

Twists and Turns!

I loved the premise of this book! The twists and turns kept me guessing all the way to the end.

Smart heroine with a good cat. Great town and retail setting.

I like smart protagonists and cute cats who are respected. I like mysteries solved by smart people. I like cooperative actions and delusionary thought errors explained.

Decent overall but a couple issues

It was a fun little story. I've recently gotten into audiobooks and like the "food" mysteries.

A few things stuck out while listenin though:

1) When the narrator speaks, she uses the same tone for all levels of excitement. This was rather odd when the main character was supposed to be yelling and she sounded monotone.

2) It was difficult at times to tell when the main character was participating in conversation or going through an internal monologue.

3) While I do know the title references a food term, the excessive food descriptions did not add must to the story. It got tiresome after a while, especially when the description was used just for the food a character was eating at that given time.

Average story. Bad READER and I do mean reader

The story was OK, I didn't like how the mother kept calling her daughter darling sometimes several times in one sentence it just seemed redundant... who calls a daughter darling.

The narrator/reader was not good unfortunately there are no different voices she is not providing anything to the story as a matter of fact she detects from it . Essentially this could've been done by a virtual reader which I am poor but she uses no different character tones nothing... she just read the book

She is so logical and follows the case with deductions

I liked the books and the fact that the food sounds amazing, kinda wish there were recipes with these.