Cozy author Stephanie Cole has new release and giveaway

One of my favorite cozy authors, Stephanie Cole, has a brand new release, Evil Under the Tuscan Sun, along with a giveaway. Evil Under the Tuscan Sun is book 3 in the Tuscan Cooking School mysteries.

First, here's a little about the story: Nell Valenti is at ease when managing a farm to table cooking school in sun-dappled Tuscany, but begins to feel the heat when tasked with catching a killer. When a wealthy New York philanthropist pays top dollar for a private, four-day ziti workshop, Nell Valenti wants everyone at the Orlandini cooking school focused on the task at hand. But complications abound when Nell’s boyfriend Pete Orlandini rushes to Rome for an unexpected business trip, Chef Orlandini is more preoccupied with a potential spot on an American cooking show than preparing for the workshop, and an uninvited woman sneaks into the villa to inspect Pete’s olive grove. The last disturbance proves deadly, and when the woman’s body is found in the grove, Nell must investigate before her hopes for the workshop, like the olives, are crushed.

Nell now has another item on her checklist—keep the Orlandinis out of trouble and the wealthy ziti-lovers happy while she looks into the stranger’s past. When Nell discovers that for one of the Orlandinis, at least, the murder victim was not such a stranger after all, and that when a detective goes digging in Italy, she’d better be ready for truffle.

Next, I asked Stephanie Cole to tell us about her inspiration for the story: For me, there’s never just a single inspiration for a story. There can be two or three tidbits that seem to float around inside my heart for a while until I see how I can pull them together in a

 meaningful and interesting way — if I can! Without divulging too much about the murder plot of EVIL UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN, I can tell you something about another tidbit that grew into the subplot that dovetails with the main plot in the story. There’s a painting by Italian Baroque artist Caravaggio, “St. Matthew and the Angel,” that was apparently destroyed in wartime Berlin in 1945. It’s such a wonderful painting that the thought it was destroyed felt unbearable. So the tidbit floating around in my heart became How can I change that terrible fate? At least in my imagination. And that would have to be enough. What that inspiration led to was a possible tie-in with wholesale Nazi art theft during those years. . and, in my book, I found a way to bring a fresh twist to that.

And tell us about your research for the book: I’m fond of joking about myself that if there’s a hard way of doing something, I’ll find it. My series is set in Tuscany, which leads to lots of lines of necessary research — idiomatic language, customs, up-to-date information about places, daily Italian life, and so on. Answers to most of that sort of thing can be found through Google, but even so may take some additional verification. In the case of the art crime subplot for this book, I opened a pretty heavy can of weighty worms. In real life, the painting had apparently been moved from the museum (I had to do lots of research about the museum) to a fire tower (why? where? and so on) that was destroyed in an Allied bombing attack (when? would it dovetail with the timing in my story?). And then the key question became: what if the painting wasn’t there in the first place? Ahh! Then where was it really, and who facilitated that, and why? I also had to research wartime travel between Berlin and the Vatican. How easy was that? Were there blockades? Roving fascist bands? Trucks that routinely made the trip? Once a part of the story becomes told in the historical “present,” the work of research becomes infinitely more difficult. . .and, I believe, delicious.

Here's a little bit about the author Stephanie Cole (aka Shelley Costa): Shelley Costa’s work has been nominated for both the Edgar and Agatha Awards, and has received a Special Mention for The Pushcart Prize. In addition to several mystery novels – the latest, under the pen name Stephanie Cole, is Evil Under the Tuscan Sun (Penguin Random House, February 2022) -- she is the author of short stories in The Georgia Review, North American Review, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Blood on Their Hands, and Odd Partners. With a PhD in English, Shelley was on the Liberal Arts faculty at the Cleveland Institute of Art for nearly twenty years.

Please leave Stephanie a comment for a chance to win book 1 of the series, Al Dente's Inferno.

Well, this book certainly sounds like my cup of tea! You can buy Evil Under the Tuscan Sun HERE

Happy reading! Mary Ellis, Suspense Sisters