Customer Reviews

Cook's Night Out: An Angie Amalfi Mystery (Angie Amalfi Mysteries)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Gourmet chef Angelina Amalfi is tired of her cooking career going nowhere. She decides to remedy that problem by creating the most irresistible chocolate the world has ever tasted, the angelinas. However, her experiments result in many delicious but rejected chocolates that she donates to the Random Acts of Kindess Mission. She also agrees to help with the mission's upcoming charity auction.

As Angelina's career hopefully takes off, her lover, San Francisco police officer Paavo Smith, watches his own vocation fall apart. On one case, murder evidence mysteriously disappears leading to the freeing of an obvious killer. This is followed up with the murder of a numbers runner who carries Paavo's phone number on him. The internal affairs department begins to wonder if they have a dirty cop to deal with. However, residing at the mission is a lifetime enemy of Paavo, who plans to destroy the cop by starting with his reputation. It is up to Angelina to not only save her lover's professional credibility, but his life as well..

The fifth novel, THE COOK'S NIGHT OUT, in the delightfully delicious Angelina Amalfi series is a reader's gourmet delight due to the escapades of the lead female protagonist. Paavo is a great character and San Francisco is always a star attraction. The romantic suspense story line is filled with intrigue. The four previous books in Joanne Pence's collection are being released one at a time, starting in February and any fan of romantic suspense needs to read them because they are some of the best books of the nineties.

Harriet Klausner

I'm not quite finished the book, but I couldn't wait to do a review of it. It was very good. It kept you going with trying to find out what was happening and how. It also kept you entertained with some of the things that happened with Angie and Connie. I am thoroughly enjoying this book (the first I have read from this author). I will definitely be picking up her others.

Since I got this book as a present, I could not start with the first book in the series (as I would normally do with any series) and had to jump right in the middle. Although it is already the fifth book in this series, I don't feel that I have missed much not having read the previous four books. Don't get me wrong: it is an entertaining read after a hard, long day (because you don't have to use your brain much), but the villain was simply too obvious, Angelina's attempts at becoming a chocolatier were half-heartedly (at least to me) and there are too many attempts in this book to make it seem like a Diane Mott Davidson-novel....without any recepies and without much success, however. At times I had the impression that Paavo Smith is the main-character of this book and not Angelina Amalfi. Angelina seemed more like a supporting character to me. If you are into Mystries including recipies better get the Goldy Schulz-series by Dianne Mott Davidson (far better) or the PennDutch-series by Tamar Myers (hilariously funny).

Even if there were nothing else in the book, the evolving intrigue in the character of the reverend would surge my interest through the book. Is he a good guy; is he a con artist? Is he a comical, off-brand, visiting deity, a spinnoff of little guy in the movie, with the cigar and the Brooklyn accent? Pence must have been giggling as she was typing, tweaking this character's fun fluctuations. I relished every flicker of sunlight and shadow, all the way to the end of the story, which sizzled with a more creative resolution of Reverend Hodge than many writers could have conjured.

In this plot, Paavo was forced to dredge the depths of his self-esteem sludge, plummeting to the hairy roots of his professional position, fighting like Serpico against internal corruption, presenting a foil against Angie's continued dedication to his soul balance. I particularly liked the scene around this quote from Paavo, on page 105 of this mass market paperback version:

"I'm foul-tempered, I have a season in hell for a job, I don't have the time to give you what you deserve or the money to spend on you that I'd like to. Now I'm even losing my good name around the hall-for whatever that was worth."

The tempering prose surrounding that quote is exquisitely touching. It's worth taking time to note the wholeness of that scene when you read this novel. The scene exposes how a true author dramatizes sensitivity and charges emotions without being too gooey or too superficial.

Returning to the reverend and his Random Acts of Kindness mission, I'll note that I enjoyed the unique way Pence dealt with charity, and religious fads and foibles. Similarly to her sensitive exposure of various angles of New Age guru-ery in COOKING UP TROUBLE, she exposes here not only the preponderance of phoney cover-ups and criminally self-serving "charitable" acts; she also dramatizes how easy it can be for very normal people to want to be part of a soup kitchen type of giving.

Angie's continued all-out support of Paavo, without losing a Quantum or Quark of her personal integrity, develops further in this plot as she chooses to remain within a bad situation in Hodge's program, going against Paavo's repeated demands that she stay away from there. The way both Angie and Paavo deal with this conflict and its resulting tension is creatively realistic.

If you want the cozy "same ole routine" which we all look for in genre expectations, you'll get satisfaction from Pence's series. But you'll get more than you hoped for, because Pence's talent pushes her to take the "norm," do justice to it, then spin it around in a fast circle in her mind until something uniquely, honestly refreshing takes shape in a slightly shifting surprise. This # 5 in the series does that slight surprise a bit more than the other books, especially in resolutions of ongoing questions about, is it/he/she "this way" or "that way" ... a good or bad guy or deal?

The twists are so numerous they become entertaining labyrinths, and sometimes the points become circles rather than zigs and zags.

In one of these twists Pence solved a problem which I gave one of my characters in my mystery pilot, which my character couldn't solve without breaking through paranormal barriers between life and death. Pence's ingenious solution required and used the dark essence in her character; my solution, limited by my character's bright old soul, had no way out (or in) but to stretch & borrow time, by a means which I believe we'll all achieve, in time.

The problem was:

How does one fake one's own murder without presenting one's dead body as proof. And, WHOM does one set up falsely for the fall?

"Regular" type death is easier to fake than murder, as has been done many times and ways in works of fiction as well as in reality. But, in order to do this, a person has to break at least a few moral and spiritual codes, has to hurt a few innocents, has to have a certain amount of darkness in his character. My character, Ruth, a ninety-year-old sprite, couldn't accomplish her goal in any normal, "right" way, so she broke a metaphysical barrier most New Age gurus don't know about, though Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan exposed a Way of Knowledge which came close.

Given this info, possibly it will be more clear why I'm in awe of the resolutions in this novel, especially the way Axel Klaw had planned his "final" exit, to the "T" ... bone.

But ... what about the numerous varieties of ultimates in gourmet chocolate slathering this plot? They made me hungry for the exPENSIVE, freshly original, leading-edge types of confection! "Chocolates are us" will never be the same.

Lifting my goblet, swirling a dark red Merlo, please allow me to toast a master of gently stepping the toe of a high-heeled sandal through the ultimate barriers of intrigue,

Linda G. Shelnutt

P.S. I also appreciated the way Pence's characters were sorted so cleanly by their responses to the tarnishing onslaughts to Paavo's professional integrity.