Mornings: Damage Control
When I took the job of designing a cooking school for American gastrotourists (i.e., foodies) at the Tuscan villa of world-famous Chef Claudio Orlandini, I was offered more money than I had yet seen in this line of design work — plus a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to gush over Chef himself, who had been my culinary crush and hero when I got my professional chef’s training at the Culinary Institute of New York. I had never met him, mind you. After all, how often do we get to meet legends?

When I arrived at the Villa Orlandini, a five-hundred-year-old former convent set on a hillside outside the city walls of Cortona, Italy, a few lovely things happened. Most of them were named Pete Orlandini, Chef’s forty-year old son. But I am a professional, and I was already viewing this job as the kind of early-career masterpiece that would rocket me, Jersey girl Nell Valenti, into the culinary stratosphere. This, I learned quickly, was the kind of nonsense that would only land me in greater trouble than I’d already seen on Day One at the villa.

We don’t even want to go into things like the resident porcupine, the crumbling fountain (which turned out to be the next-to-final resting place of a murder victim) the villa’s general decrepitude, and pesky facts like my former crush/hero appeared to have forsaken his culinary life’s work in favor of full-time bocce. Worst of all, upon my arrival I learned that the Orlandinis had gone right ahead and scheduled a fancy dinner party the next day to celebrate the launch of the new cooking school. Far be it from me to play wet kitchen towel on these matters, but I did have to point out that the cooking school did not yet exist. A minor issue, apparently, to the impetuous Orlandinis. Somehow I’d have to make the villa presentable to local dignitaries such as a Roman socialite, a well-known food critic, and the Cortona equivalent of a chamber of commerce guy. You say this would be a bad time for a team of Netflix documentary filmmakers to turn up to film the “launch?” Yes, it would. And they did.

So, mornings I usually spend immersed in damage control. A sample list from that first day: relocate porcupine; encourage Chef to wear false teeth, shower after bocce match, and pour on the (dimly remembered) charm.

Afternoons: Piling up Sandbags
When what you’re looking at is Doom Minus Six Hours, you get ruthlessly practical. Instead of wringing my hands over a long damp wall inside the villa’s common room, I discussed with the irresistible Pete the most effective ways to deal with the moss growing there. The quickest solution, which gained some traction, was to turn down the lights and stick evergreen diffusers all over the place, but in the end we decided to enlist the help of some local charitable nuns to scour the vertical moss farm with bleach.

To address the problems of tattered upholstery and tables with wobbly legs, Pete performed a one-phone-call gambit, renting a whole roomful of pricey designer furniture from Cassina’s in Florence. In came the stylish and new, out went the dilapidated and old. Some palm-greasing of Cassina van drivers was involved. Annamaria Bari, Chef’s sixty-year old sous chef, widened her flashing dark eyes at the changes in the common room, and wordlessly handed me a double espresso. We became friends.

Evenings: Putting out Fires
The problem with any kind of intrigue is that mere mortals like me, Nell Valenti, a newcomer to the age-old Tuscan habits of secrecy, are at a huge disadvantage. So when the Roman socialite, the well-known food critic, the chamber of commerce guy, and the filmmakers show up as supreme dinner guests, I made a typical Jersey girl assumption that they’re all exactly who and what they say they are. If Contessa says she’s a contessa, who am I to argue?

My real name is Ornella, which is just about all the secret I can hold. So I wasn’t prepared for the undercurrents, the intrigues, the carefully guarded secrets, the flinging about of malocchios — curses invoking the Evil Eye, never, never a thing to be trifled with, as Annamaria warns me, herself a lusty curse-flinger. So my first real evening at Villa Orlandini was a dangerous taste of Things To Come in my Tuscan work life, because even beautiful, rented furniture wasn’t enough to take a killer’s mind off murder. And murder occurred. And secrets were at stake.

Damage control, piling up sandbags, putting out fires. Was I a cooking school designer? Or a one-woman emergency management system? And would I stick around long enough to find out? There was, I told myself, Pete. But who was to say whether the one at Chef’s sublime dinner that night who had the biggest secret to protect — and the best motive for murder — wasn’t Pete Orlandini himself?

Al Dente’s Inferno is the first book in the NEW “Tuscan Cooking School” cozy mystery series, released February 25, 2020.

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.

Purchase Link
# # # # # # # # # # #

About the author
Stephanie Cole is the pseudonym of Shelley Costa, whose work has been nominated for the Edgar and Agatha Awards. She is the author of You Cannoli Die Once, Basil Instinct, Practical Sins for Cold Climates, A Killer’s Guide to Good Works, several stories in AHMM, Blood on Their Hands, and The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories. Her latest is “Glock, Paper, Scissors,” (in Odd Partners, Ballantine, 2019). Writing as Stephanie Cole, she has a new Tuscany-set mystery series, debuting this month with Al Dente’s Inferno (Berkley, February 2020).

All comments are welcomed.