Calypso, Corpses, and Cooking

October 1, 2022

Trouble seems to follow Miriam Quinones-Smith, a Cuban American cooking show star, wherever she goes. The morning after her son's school fall festival, Miriam finds a woman passed out in her yard among Halloween tombstone decorations. Miriam's husband knows all the woman's family problems, but Miriam has her own. Her hateful mother-in-law volunteered her to head up the Women's Club gala and menu. It's usually a stodgy affair, but Miriam recruits friends so that this year's gala features Caribbean food trucks. When the committee meets at the country club, they overhear an argument, and the new chef takes a header off the stairway. Because she fears her best friend's assistant might be a suspect, Miriam starts poking around, but she has other things on her mind: she's three months pregnant, and she's a little slow to realize she's a threat to a killer. VERDICT The first "Caribbean Kitchen Mystery," Calypso, Corpses, and Cooking, won the 2022 Lefty Award for Best Humorous Mystery, but Reyes's sequel is somewhat convoluted and ends abruptly. Add this title, with its varied cast and a great deal of Spanish dialogue, where the first was popular.--Lesa Holstine

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November 1, 2022
A food anthropologist stirs a messy pot of murder. After earning her doctorate in New York studying the foodways of the Caribbean, Miriam Qui�ones is happy to be back in her hometown of Miami, though the gated enclave of Coral Shores has little in common with the Cuban community where she grew up. But much as she misses the sights, sounds, and colors of Hialeah, she enjoys the sense of security Coral Shores affords her husband, Robert, her preschooler, Manny, and the new little arrival she expects in May. So she's more than a little disconcerted to find the words HELP MURDER scrawled on the side of her house. More disconcerting yet is finding socialite Lois Pimpkin the next day lying in Miriam's front yard with a severe wound to the head. A few days later, Miriam has a front-row seat when Sebi Malkov, chef at the Coral Shores Country Club, takes a header off the second-floor balcony and dies. By now, Hialeah is looking pretty tame. Between prepping for her two cooking shows--Cocina Caribe�a on UnMundo and Abuela Approved on YouTube--and doing advance work for the charity gala her snooty mother-in-law roped her into, Miriam has no time to investigate. But as the corpses pile up, she feels she must, if only to restore the sense of peace and security her growing family deserves. A mind-boggling combination of Byzantine motives and oddball coincidences is required to solve this one. Reyes serves up a variety of Caribbean treats that maybe should not all be on the same plate.

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November 21, 2022
Reyes’s enjoyable if uneven sequel to 2021’s Mango, Mambo, and Murder finds cooking show host Miriam Quinones-Smith just wanting peace as she prepares for her second baby at her home in Coral Shores, “a village within Miami,” Fla. But then the words Help Murder are painted on her house, and an almost-dead woman turns up in her front yard. Even planning for the tedious Women’s Club gala turns treacherous when the executive chef is found dead. As the attacks and body count pile up, Miriam’s friend Ana is brought in for questioning by the police. Intrepid Miriam doesn’t trust the investigation and sets out to unearth the truth to protect her friends and family. Too much everyday minutiae slows the complicated plot, which builds to a rushed conclusion full of explanations of various motives, though the untranslated passages of Spanish lend color, and readers are sure to savor the delectable recipes at the end. Fans of Mia P. Manansala’s Arsenic and Adobe will want to check this out. Agent: Saritza Hernández, Andrea Brown Literary.