Murder and Marinara, by Rosie Genova

Cozy up to pasta and poison on the Jersey shore in this murder mystery. This little mystery was named “Best Cozy” of 2013 by Suspense magazine. Cozies are a subgenre of crime fiction in which sex and violence are downplayed or treated humorously, and the crime and detection take place in a small, socially intimate community. Well, there’s a lot of humor and intrigue among the Rienzi family at the Jersey shore boardwalk, for your entertainment.

Victoria Rienzi is a successful mystery writer living in New York City. After eight years away from home, she’s decided it’s time to reconnect with her family across the Hudson. At the same time, she wants to take her writing career to a new place by writing a serious, historical novel about Italian family immigrants. What better place to do this than back at home, surrounded by her very Italian family including her grandmother, her nonna?

Her family runs a wonderful, neighborhood Italian restaurant named the Casa Lido, and Victoria plans to help out as a waitress and also to convince her nonna to teach her to cook her very special meals. While she’s helping her family she’ll be researching and writing her new book. It all sounds like a great plan, except to her agent who thinks she needs to continue with her mystery series. Victoria is surprised when she arrives to see her ex-boyfriend working at the restaurant, adding spice to the original plan.

There’s big excitement outside the restaurant too because Hollywood plans to film a reality television show right there on the boardwalk, and so many of the locals don’t like that at all. During the chaotic arrival of the cast and crew among the protestors, the Casa Lido turns out to be the place where the Producer eats his last meal. Could something have been slipped in to heat up the meal, and by whom? Or did the poison come from something other than the food?

With a brother on the local police force, and at the excited urging of her agent, and with the threat to her family’s restaurant, Victoria begins her amateur sleuthing. She gets help in her quest from her enthusiastic sister-in-law as well as sometimes eccentric advice from her fearless grandmother.

Author Rosie Genova is proud to be a Jersey girl herself. She still lives in New Jersey and when she’s not writing her mystery series, she teaches English and Journalism.

The suspects’ trails will heat up, and the clues will be simmering; now the only question is whether you’ll solve the mystery before Victoria.

Thereby hangs a tale . . . .

— By Wendy Kendall

Wendy Kendall is a writer, project manager and volunteer at the Edmonds Library. She’s enjoyed living in Edmonds for over 20 years. Follow her via her blog here or on Twitter @wendywrites1.