Death in Aramezzo - Michelle Damiani

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?