Customer Reviews

To Catch a Cook: An Angie Amalfi Mystery (Angie Amalfi Mysteries)

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2 star:		(1)
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Homicide detective Paavo Smith grew up believing his mother was a good time girl, who always dumped him and his sister with her neighbor when she decided not to play mommy. The only thing he has that was hers is a cheap cameo broach, which he gives to his San Francisco girlfriend Angie Amalfi, who treasures the gift that comes from Paavo's heart. She wears it everyday until the broach falls out of the setting.

Angie takes it to a jeweler only to learn the piece is a valuable Russian antique that he wants to buy due to its museum-like quality. Angie refuses to sell it and the jeweler agrees to fix it. As soon as she leaves the store, the jeweler places a mysterious call that places everyone connected to the cameo in danger. Paavo's stepfather is in a hospital suffering from a coma after being shot in the head. The jeweler is dead. Numerous efforts to kill Paavo and Angie occur. Paavo believes the current vendetta is tied to something his parents did three decades ago that impacts the Russian Mafia today.

This work is a bit different than the previous Amalfi mysteries because for the first time Paavo accepts comfort and help from someone else. The audience learns more about the inner demons that have driven him for years. By Paavo learning the truth about his past, the healing process finally begins and his girlfriend Angie lovingly assists in the process. Jeanne Pence shows her talent as a mighty good mystery writer and adds a great human element that turns this tale into a fabulous drama.

Harriet Klausner

Angie Amalfi has messed up big time. She has lost the antique broach that once belonged to her significant other's mother. She knows her detective boyfriend will not be amused that he only thing he has to remember his mother by has vanished. She must have a replacement made and soon. To top it all off her apartment, Paavo's place and his stepfather's house have all been broken into. The result is his stepfather is in the hospital. When Angie learns that the jeweler has been murdered, she knows deep down that it's time to panic. The answers lie from Arizona to Russia, from family secrets to an unknown past, all leading to Paavo and his family and a recipe for disaster. TO CATCH A COOK is murder most baffling and nobody stirs a murderous brew like Joanne Pence, complete with colorful characters, and a recipe to die for, Pence serves up a murder so hot, a plot twist so unique that you'll be left dying for another sample. I simply cannot wait to read the next tasty culinary treat that Pence has penned. Pamela Cornwell James

Pence seems to remember how to weave a mystery in this one- she forgot in the past few books. Its also refreshing that Angie does her best to be supportive this time, and not as pushy, letting Paavo's character finally get a little development finally after 7 books. The Angie which doesn't have to be so forceful is definitely an improvement- too bad Pence couldn't hold Angie back for more then this book, as Angie emerges self-centered and shallow (except for random moments of lucidity coming from seemingly nowhere now and then) and the bizarre background story to make it "interesting" (but really just ridiculous) in the next book, Bell Cook and Candle. This one though, is passable.

An excellent mystery with lots of twists and turns. Characters you care about. This author should be in hard back on a best seller list! I nearly over looked this gem as it was in paperback. I read about a book per day and this was one of the best I have read in ages.

One of my favorite scenes in this series took place in this book. It was between Paavo and a 9 year old girl, after the murder of her grandfather, in a tenement building. The chapter containing that segment confirmed for me that Pence is not only an artist and an author, she's a master of her craft.

On the subject of fav's, I'll quote two passages which ID, or expose the essence of Angie and Paavo better than any other I've found in the series.

Quoting Angie's comment to Paavo, on page 231 of the mass market paperback:

>> "I want so much to do interesting things ... I want to be accomplished, an achiever. I want to be a person who is independent and successful, and good at her job - not daddy's privileged little rich girl. Not that that's so tragic. But I'm more than that, aren't I?" <<

Angie is a special character in many subtle and easy-to-see ways. I was annoyed by a reader's criticism that Angie is annoying. My first reaction to that comment was, "How wrong and how rude!" More than enough opinions weigh in favor of Angie being a capturing character in every nuance. In this novel, both she and Paavo continued to grow in warm, cozy, and realistic ways.

Paavo's personal pondering:

>> Home. He wished he didn't get a kick in the gut each time he thought about the cottage. He liked being there more than he ever dreamed he would, and more than he really wanted to admit. He had found a place away from the world's cruelty and losses where there was love and laughter, and he wondered how long he could accept it, or if he would soon want to retreat to his own quiet solitude once more. <<

Yep. That's Paavo.

I might add a note here that, for me, retreating into quiet solitude is as much, possibly more, a part of what I need in a home as love and laughter. With intuitive wisdom, Angie gives Paavo all of this, a safe, comforting place to rest or hide when a cocoon is needed for a time, and a safe place to play. The first she gives in sensitivity but not easily; the second she gives with easy, natural relish.

TO CATCH A COOK. To catch, to capture, to get, to comprehend. Is catching something like "getting it" or like identifying it? Yep. Yes. You bettcha.

Yeah, this was one of my favorite books in the Angie series, mainly because the mystery of Paavo's childhood was so intriguingly and realistically dealt with.

Pence has an ability to create emotional catharsis within intrigue. Her series exudes warmth and wit, as noted in my Listmania title, before I changed it to, "Joanne Pence Mystery Series; Better Than Nora Roberts."

Pence has something beyond those qualities, though. Charm? Yeah. Complexity? Yeah. Vision? Yes. But, what word am I hunting for here ...

Is it somehow the true essence of Mystery that Pence is so good at capturing? I can say that no mater how convoluted your brain, you could never imagine the history Paavo has been given in this book. And, yet it fits every other piece in the puzzle of this series, in not only the books which came before TO CATCH A COOK, but also in the ones to follow.

How does she do this? How does Pence evolve a mystery which deftly and faithfully carries threads and symbolism throughout a series, without even being conscious of all the machinations herself?

She's an artist. She's an author.

Maybe it's as simple and as convoluted as that.

Twists? Pence has a corner on that market. She tied this plot into so many interesting knots I'm surprised she was able to get out of the Gordian herself. Of course she did it. It almost felt as if she danced her way through a family labyrinth, then hopped onto the kitchen table to finish the footwork.

I began to see in this book, in sequence to others read prior to it, how amazingly Joanne is able to slightly change the style and mood of each story, yet retain the essence and evolution (the identifying factor?) of wherever this collection is headed.

Never say life isn't symbolic. Never say fiction doesn't reflect life. As Joanne says, "Life Happens." And so it does.
As she sows, so shall she write. And we reap the entertainment.

Thankfully, I have a few more Angie mysteries to read in past offerings in this magical series. If I'm finished with what came before, what will I ever do after I finish reading the latest Angie novel (tentatively set to be published December, 2006)?

Stay tuned. There's more to life than meets the eye. Once in a blue moon, trite gets the last word right.

Yeah, but here's the REAL conundrum:

How do you identify something precisely and accurately when it has an intense evolutionary factor, through which its identity is doing the metamorphosis thing? Will Joanne's series end up with butterflies or dragonflies on the covers? And what do they eat?

Here's why, to me, Angie is a life-blood refreshing character:

As a prior teacher of English Lit, I've tried to understand the reverence of Literary Novels, "Classical Literature." Could rarely get into most of the stuff because it was too depressing. I was seldom (if ever) in the mood to voluntarily depress or deflate myself. But sometimes I tried to read those hefty tomes, like HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad, Graham Green's novels, F. Scott Fitzgerald's GREAT GATSBY. I read enough to see and appreciate the masterful use of the language; I drooled over the exquisite beauty of the syntax, plots, and character complexity. But I began to feel disgusted, angry, and betrayed at these truly great authors who seemed to believe they had to write (probably in an alcoholic or drugged haze) with such graceful severity about the bowels of the Earth, always ending with a spirit leaching, evil panache. I felt like jumping off a cliff to get away from the doom of the no win life they portrayed.

It appeared to me that to write great literature was to be ugly serious and to travel through beautifully executed words, but to use them only within the down sides of life. The words themselves must have felt trapped in hell. Or executed.

After I've exposed that opinion, would anyone wonder why I like Angie?

There are ways to write about the deeper, darker sides of life without steeping the reader's psyche into the sourest soups of reality, and committing him there for eternity. Is our cultural heritage sick or what, to believe so strongly in that type of literary curse? The term, "crying in your soup" is trite, but it fits too many of the "classics" too well.

But, okay. Certainly there's a place for depressing literature, for dredging the swamps of life. I really don't want to condemn southern exposures (actually I loved that Alaska TV series), even though I'm not drawn to it (as a rule), and have rarely forced myself to read every page of those types of novels. In college, Cliff Notes literally saved my life a few times.

What I'd like to see in addition to these types of Pulitzer Prize offerings, is more Great Literature with the type of mood catharsis Joanne Pence accomplished in the urine touched tenement scene in TO CATCH A COOK, when the well set stench transformed with a single sentence describing the clean aura of the apartment in which a 9-year-old girl sat. Pence gave that apartment a feel of purity, a distance from tenement soullessness, even with the girl's grandfather lying dead in the next room. Yet, Pence had spared no odor in the detailed painting of the ugliness of life in that world. She painted it as it should be exposed.

Then, in that single sentence, with a few carefully chosen words about the lack of leftover food cartons, she lifted the hopeless despair into something still truly sad, but somehow refreshingly healing and quietly cathartic, even as the girl was dealing with that gut wrenching situation.

The author moved the plot further into this emotional purity within the simple exchange between Paavo and the girl. He knew how she felt; he had lived it. He also knew how to be with her, what to give her, yet to avoid breaking her difficultly maintained composure, to avoid dishonoring who she was and how she had come to deal with her life with a loved but un-pampered child's simple and serious dignity.

That scene was so powerful, I was heavily reluctant to leave it. As the story moved forward, I found myself wondering about the little girl, but the continued shifting of plot was more than enough to keep me busy and fueled. The girl's return in a few potent vignettes artistically and satisfyingly concluded her part in the story, as one of the symbolic links to Paavo's past.

This is a gem-in-the-crown of a series fit for royalty among readers.

Bless the best among us as we each evolve toward unique exposures of personal perfection,
Linda G. Shelnutt