Lila tries not to be too fazed by the whole thing, but all of that changes when her ex dies right there in the family restaurant, after eating Lila’s food. Unfortunately, an ex-boyfriend has recently turned restaurant critic for their town, and is doing his level best to bash Tita Rosie’s Kitchen. It’s not the cafe she dreamed of putting up one day, but it’s still a good opportunity for her to use her degree while she figures out the next step in her life. In the meantime, she’s helping run the family restaurant, called Tita Rosie’s Kitchen, with her Tita Rosie and Lola Flor. The novel follows Lila Macapagal, who has come home from the big city after a very bad breakup so she can recuperate and figure out what to do with the rest of her life. That one adjustment to the typical cozy mystery creates a chain of other alterations that make this novel far more enjoyable to me than the others I’ve seen in the same genre. It’s pitched as a cozy mystery, but instead of a privileged white woman, the protagonist is a member of the Filipino diaspora. Manansala’s Arsenic and Adobo ( Berkley, 2021), first in the Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mystery series. Hence my interest was piqued when I learned about Mia P.

Unlike the protagonist of the average cozy, attempting to do any sort of amateur sleuthing in my country will likely lead to one being brutalized by the police – hardly a “light” or “cozy” situation. I’m aware that the lighter aspects are precisely what draw many readers to cozies, but it’s hard to be interested in privileged white women when one is a marginalized brown woman living in a Third World country. I know, that’s a terrible word to apply to an entire genre, but it certainly felt that way to me when I attempted to pick up a few cozies myself. I’ve seen examples of the genre around, but I wasn’t really all that interested in them because they seemed so…twee. I haven’t really read any cozy mysteries before. Please be aware that the page may contain spoilers. Trigger warnings for this novel can be found here, c/o.

Adobo and arsenic