If you love to read a multicultural story and soak up some cuisine and atmosphere, the third Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mystery is just the ticket. A busy Filipino family in Shady Palms, Illinois, prepares for the Christmas season in BLACKMAIL AND BIBINGKA.
Tita Rosie’s Kitchen is the family restaurant, with amateur sleuth Lila Macapagal branching out to start a café next door. The Brew-ha Café is also managed by her best friends, and now business partners, Adeena Awan and Elena Torres. They are constantly taste-testing everything from coffees to sweet snacks, with Lila as the main cook and the others running the customer-facing part of the business. Bibingka is the Tagalog name for a seasonal snack made of rice cakes cooked in banana leaves, with a variety of toppings from salty duck eggs to sweet coconut. This aspect is highly enjoyable, and we hardly even need a crime to enjoy the story.
An issue I faced, as a new reader of this series, was the large cast of family and friends. Jae Park is Lila’s Korean boyfriend, who doesn’t play a big role but is around while Lila is busy cooking, talking to her friends, or is out scouting. Ronnie Flores, Tita Rosie’s formerly delinquent son and Lila’s cousin, spent some time in Puerto Rico, and has now returned to Illinois with a grand plan to produce coconut wine. He has bought a local winery with investment from friends Izzy and Pete Ramos-Garcia, twins, and Denise Sutton and her fiancé Xander Cruz. One of these people is not long for this world.
On top of a sudden death, there are blackmail demands to a family member of Ronnie’s, claiming to be about his fifteen years spent away from Shady Palms. He could have been doing anything. Oddly, the anonymous blackmailer never sets out a method of payment, and is in fact spreading information rather than hushing it up. The middle of the book fills up with more relatives old and young, and a night of karaoke is described song by song, so I started skipping paragraphs to get to the crime story.
Anyone who read a previous books in this series would know a lot of the names, but for a new reader, the cast list may be daunting. This was my first visit, and I still enjoyed the mystery. BLACKMAIL AND BIBINGKA is an enjoyable treat for all the senses. Some recipes are added at the back, with banana leaves as an optional extra. They do look tempting.
It’s Christmastime in Shady Palms, but things are far from jolly for Lila Macapagal. Sure, her new business, the Brew-ha Cafe, is looking to turn a profit in its first year. And yes, she’s taken the first step in a new romance with her good friend Jae Park. But her cousin Ronnie is back in town after ghosting the family fifteen years ago, claiming that his recent purchase of a local winery shows that he’s back on his feet and ready to contribute to the Shady Palms community. Tita Rosie is thrilled with the return of her prodigal son, but Lila knows that wherever Ronnie goes, trouble follows.
She’s soon proven right when Ronnie is suspected of murder, and secrets surrounding her shady cousin and those involved with the winery start piling up. Now Lila has to put away years of resentment and distrust to prove her cousin’s innocence. He may be a jerk, but he’s still family. And there’s no way her flesh and blood could actually be a murderer . . . right?
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