Arsenic and Adobo (A Tita Rosie's Kitchen Mystery Book 1)

Lila just moved back to her hometown from New York after a nasty breakup and to help run her aunt’s restaurant. One day her high school ex, Derek, also a locally hated food critic, comes into the restaurant with his step father. As they are eating their desserts Derek suddenly falls face first into his bowl later to be pronounced dead with high levels of arsenic in his system. Can Lila clear her name and her Tita Rosie’s restaurant from wrong doing and find the real killer?

Overall I enjoyed this cozy mystery with a Filipino-American family at the center of it. The descriptions of food made my mouth water. I definitely want to try some of the recipes from this book! It was especially fun because I had a sister who lived in the Philippines for a time and so I recognized a few of the things they mentioned. I can attest to Lumpia be amazing.

Unfortunately there were quite a few extraneous details added in randomly. They didn’t add anything to the story except length and therefore the flow of the story was off. I was listening to this on a road trip and actually skipped some of the “wrap up” because it dragged on too long for me.

I knew who the murderer was very early on. There were a couple of clues that were repeated over and over. This meant the “reveals” weren’t actually revealing anything we hadn’t learned already. There was a bit of a twist near the end that threw me off for a minute which was nice. However the clues shortly after the twist felt like they were slapping us in the face with what happened and it still took Lila forever to figure it all out.

Having said that, this was still a pretty well written book (just needed some editing) and I’m excited for future installments in the series.