Small villages keep big secrets.
Chef Stella Buchanan, rising star in the Manhattan restaurant scene, suddenly finds herself blackballed, without a job or any prospects. She retreats to Aramezzo, her family's ancestral village in Italy. Her plan: sell the abandoned bed-and-breakfast and use the money to start over.
Her mother never had a nice word about the quaint Umbrian town, so Stella is resistant to the warm welcome of the locals: a quippy trash collector, an eccentric bookstore owner, a burly cop with a penchant for historical romances, an antiquarian who spins fantastical yarns, and a former race car enthusiast who now drives a porchetta van.
Plus, to Stella's chagrin, the property comes with a belligerent cat.
Then her first guest dies under puzzling circumstances, and suddenly, Stella—a stranger in a small town—comes under scrutiny.
She must sniff out new clues and develop a theory of the murder, as she would a recipe in her kitchen. Searching through ancient cobblestone alleys and across vineyards full of tangled vines, can Stella discover the bitter truth before the town's buried secrets claim another victim?
Read the eagerly awaited debut cozy mystery by bestselling author of books set in Italy, Michelle Damiani! Death in Aramezzo is book one of a six book series.