An American chef will have to serve up more than good eats if she wants to establish a successful farm-to-table cooking school in Tuscany, in this charming first installment in a new cozy mystery series set in Italy.
When Nell Valenti is offered a chance to move to Tuscany to help transform an aging villa into a farm-to-table cooking school, she eagerly accepts. After all, both her job and her love life in America have been feeling stale. Plus, she'll get the chance to work under the acclaimed Italian Chef Claudio Orlandini.
But Nell gets more than she bargained for when she arrives. With only a day to go until the launch dinner for the cooking school, the villa is in shambles, and Chef O is blissfully oblivious of the work that needs to be done before a group of local dignitaries arrive, along with a filmmaker sent to showcase and advertise the new school. The situation only worsens when Nell discovers that the filmmaker is an ex-boyfriend, and he’s found murdered later that night. Even worse, Chef O has disappeared, and accusations of murder could shut the school down for good.
As tensions reach a boiling point at the villa, Nell must throw her chef's hat into the ring, and investigate the murder herself. Because if she fails to solve the case, her career, or even her life, could be next on the chopping block.
This is an interesting start to a new series, although I did find it fairly easy to guess who the murderer was, the story itself was fun.
Nell has escaped from her overbearing parents and trained as a chef, she has then taken on a number of short term contracts the latest of which has landed her in Tuscany to help set up a cookery school. When she arrives though she discovers the job will be a LOT harder than she was led to understand, the villa is basically a shambles and will need extensive work, but the worst is that in 24 hours they plan to hold a small launch party which will be filmed! To add to her stress the film maker (from Netflix) turns out to be her ex, but even that is nothing to the stress of discovering him dead part way through the party, with Chef Orlandini having gone missing!
Now Nell and Pete Orlandini (Chef's son) will have to track down the missing chef, a murderer and get the work started on the cookery school – the heat of a kitchen has nothing on this!
Crafts and Life 
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