Al Dente’s Inferno

Tuscan charm, humor, and fantastic food! Stephanie Cole paints Tuscany vividly from the olive groves to the vineyards. Breakfasts of Bavarian-filled pastry and elegant dinners with white truffle pappardelle blend with clever sleuthing and hysterical mishaps. A delightful mystery, both comforting and exotic, peppered with unexpected characters.

Dollycas’s Thoughts

American chef Nell Valenti needs a break from her family, job, and love life in the States so she jumps at the chance to set up a farm-to-table cooking school in Tuscany. The icing on the cake is that she will be working alongside acclaimed Italian Chef Claudio Orlandini.

Her arrival is a little bumpy but she is finally picked up and transported to the villa where the cooking school will be located and where she will be staying. It is nowhere near what she imagined and clearly sees she has her work cut out of her. Sadly, she seems to be the only one that sees the disorder around them and all the repairs and renovation needed to fulfill the needs of a cooking school. Chef Claudio is so excited he has invited a group of dignitaries for a launch dinner. There is also a filmmaker coming to film the school to use in future advertising.

As the guests arrive Nell is shaken to her core. The filmmaker is her ex-boyfriend that she left back in America. The dinner is filled with fits and starts but after it breaks up, the filmmaker is found dead and Claudio is nowhere to be found.

Nell knows her history with the deceased could make her a prime suspect so she decides to investigate the murder herself. An American in the country for only a few days she does her best to find the killer because even with the school in disarray she needs the job and hopes to stay. That is if she survives.

Stephanie Cole has introduced some interesting characters in this story. Nell is a character I could grow to love. She sees she has a mountain to climb in turning an old rundown villa into a cooking school and she doesn’t run off at her first chance, especially when everyone else seems to be wearing rose-colored glasses when they look at the place. She also hides her shock when meeting Chef Claudio Orlandini. Her hero certainly does not look or act as she expected. Nell becomes attached to the Chef’s son as he gives her the tour of Villa Orlandini, introduces her to all the staff, and translates as needed. They do make a good sleuthing team. We also meet the staff but the author has left plenty of room for growth for all the characters in future stories.

I loved the Tuscan Cooking School theme of the book/series but it is not without a couple of pitfalls.

Setting the series in Tuscany does present a language problem. Most of the characters are going to speak Italian as their first language which means the book is full of translations. This really messed with the flow for me. Sometimes the translations immediately followed in the text, other times we were on our own. I wished I was reading it on my Kindle instead of in paperback because I would have been able to highlight the words and have them quickly translated.

As with most first books in a new cozy series, a great deal of time is spent introducing the characters and setting the scenes for the story, so the mystery is not too complex. There were twists and turns but I figured it out pretty early. I did enjoy the way Nell took on the case.

Ms. Cole’s descriptive talents were on her full display as her words illustrated the villa and everyplace Nell went masterfully.

I did enjoy the liberal use of humor throughout the story. A couple of times I caught myself laughing out loud.

The food descriptions were fantastic too. I wish there had been more recipes at the back of the book. Italian dishes are my faves.

This story had good bones and with a few tweaks, I can see this being a long-running series. Nell and Chef O. are characters I want to get to know better. I also can’t wait to see Villa Orlandini become all it can be. I hope the author takes her time developing a romance for Nell although we can see where it is headed. Nell has enough on her plate without taking on another man. If the filmmaker, Buford Kaplan is the typical man she gets involved with, the girl needs a good long break.

Nell Valenti has turned her love of food and her training as a chef into a career helping establish farm to table cooking schools. When she is offered a job setting up a school for Chef Claudio Orlandini in Tuscany, she jumps at the chance. Not only is she looking for some changes in her life, but Chef Claudio is her culinary idol. However, Nell is shocked upon her arrival to discover that the villa Chef Claudio owns is in worse disrepair than she expected, meaning the transformation is going to be more work than she’d expected. Then comes the news that a kick off dinner with some local dignitaries is scheduled for the next evening. Even worse, the dinner ends with some of the guests dead and Chef Claudio missing. What has Nell gotten herself into?

I picked up this book with high hopes. It’s fun to see a cozy in a new setting, and Tuscany appealed to me. Unfortunately, the language barrier made the book hard to get into initially. Yes, we need bits of Italian, and not all of the characters are going to speak English, but it felt like too many Italian words and phrases were thrown out, and we had to wait for the translation to appear or figure out what was meant in context. While it took a bit longer to be hooked than I would have liked, it did happen once the plot kicked into high gear. We are treated to a great mystery with plenty of suspects. As Nell pieces things together, I was in awe of just how well the clues were laid out for us. Nell is a good main character, and the core cast also comes to life for us as well. There are some laugh out loud funny scenes here, and, of course, we get a delicious sounding recipe at the end. The characters, plot, and setting make this a fun debut.

AlDente’s Inferno, the first in the new Tuscan Cooking School mysteries, is a treat of Italian cooking and living. The series protagonist is Nell Valenti, a young woman who has arrived in Cortona, a small village in Tuscany, to organize a farm-to-table culinary school for her idol, Chef Claudio Orlandini. Much to Nell’s chagrin, the villa is in shambles, the Chef is more interested in playing bocce than in cooking, and there is a gala dinner to launch the school the day after she arrives. To add insult to injury, a film crew from Netflix arrives to film the launch, and it is headed by none other than Nell’s former flame, Bu Kaplan. When Chef disappears in the middle of the dinner and Nell, while looking for him, stumbles onto the murdered body of Bu, she reluctantly investigates in order to save the school’s reputation.

This was an enjoyable debut. Nell is an interesting protagonist. She suffers from low self-confidence, partially due to an overprotective father. She also has a very dry sense of humor. To be honest, it took me a while to warm up to Nell – I felt distant from the character for about the first half of the book. I started to warm up to her when she realized that she wanted to stay and solve the mystery for the sake of everyone involved with the cooking school, and that she really did feel a kinship with them. At that point, I was invested in the story and thoroughly enjoyed spending time with Nell.

Speaking of every one at the villa, author Stephanie Cole has created a rich cast of supporting characters, from the mercurial Chef Claudio Orlandini, to his sous chef AnnaMaria, the farmhand Macy, and the “sisters”, a group of Italian women who assist in getting the villa prepared for the launch dinner. The sisters are nuns from the nearby convent, and it is not clear if they are also AnnaMaria’s biological sisters. In any case, they are a delightful bunch, especially when they spontaneously burst into Billy Joel songs. And then there is Pierfranco, (Pete for short), Chef Claudio’s son who teams up with Nell to solve the mystery, and who may be a love interest in future installments.

The mystery itself in intriguing, but almost takes a backseat to the Tuscan countryside and the strong Italian personalities that populate the story. I didn’t figure out who the killer was before the big reveal, despite the fact that the clue was in plain sight. The author sprinkles Italian phrases throughout the story. Some are translated, some can be guessed at from the contest of the conversation. All in all, I think the author did a great job of accurately depicting the chaos and color of a small Italian village and the people who inhabit it. Now that Nell has gained some self-confidence, I am looking forward to the second installment, The Crime of the Ancient Marinara.

Al Dente’s Inferno by Stephanie Cole is the beginning of A Tuscan Cooking School Mystery series. I enjoyed the word imagery of the Tuscan countryside and the dilapidated Orlandini villa. I had to laugh when Nell found mold and a critter in the public rooms. Nell thought she was just upgrading a farm-to-table cooking school. Instead, it seems she is starting from scratch. Unfortunately, the launch dinner for the local dignitaries is the next evening. Then someone kills the filmmaker which could put the kibosh on the cooking school before it opens. While I enjoyed the Italian setting, I was not a fan of the multiple Italian words and phrases in the story. Some of them are explained, but many of them are not. I quickly tired of them as it disrupted the flow of the story plus I had no clue what they meant (unless I used the translation feature on my e-book). The clichés were another annoyance (way too many). I believe they were meant to be humorous. There are some interesting characters in the story, but I found background information to be lacking. I thought Al Dente’s Inferno was a slow starter. The murder does not occur until you are a third of the way into the story (way too late). If you are a frequent reader of cozy mysteries, you will have already identified the killer by the time the dufus (i.e. the filmmaker and Nell’s ex-boyfriend) turns up dead. There are good clues to aid readers in solving the crime and I liked Nell’s approach to the investigation. It was straightforward with a Jessica Fletcher type reveal at the end. I liked that most of the focus of Al Dente’s Inferno was on cooking and the whodunit. I did not like when it delved into a new romantic interest for Nell. Considering her recent breakup and taste in men, Nell needs to wait before diving into a new romantic relationship (she needs to keep her focus on the school). I did enjoy Nell’s snarky comments. Al Dente’s Inferno could have used a little more work before it was published (in my personal opinion). Al Dente’s Inferno has a crumbling cloister, a pesky porcupine, a curious conveyance, mouthwatering meals, and a frustrating filmmaker.