05 August 2025
‘A sizzling read sauced with scares galore’ – ORLANDO MURRIN
‘Forget five stars, this deserves a Michelin star’ – J.M. HEWITT
‘A deliciously dark tale with a mouth-watering mystery at its heart’ – T.M. LOGAN
She has the recipe for the perfect murder…
Maria Capello is a celebrity chef like no other. A household name with dozens of cookbooks and a weekly television show, not to mention her line of bestselling supermarket sauces. Once just the timid wife of famous chef Damien Capello, she stepped into the spotlight after his mysterious disappearance, an event she’s never spoken about publicly… until now.
Why is Maria willing to break her silence? When editor Thea Woods is invited to Maria’s remote farmhouse to work on the manuscript of her tell-all memoir, Thea spots an opportunity. She could be the one to finally learn whether the rumours are true. Did Maria kill Damien for his recipes and the legendary ‘secret ingredient’? Or is the truth even darker?
A deliciously rich thriller, perfect for readers of Bella Mackie’s How To Kill Your Family and Alexia Casale’s The Best Way to Bury Your Husband.
I’ve always said recipes are like family. Even the best ones are hiding something.
Take meatballs, for instance. Meatballs are a food built on secrets. People think they’re Italian, but ground meat rolled into balls have been featured throughout Greece and Rome and the Middle East. In the Middle Ages, impoverished populations all over the world mixed their meat with breadcrumbs, onions, butter, and minced garlic to make it last.
Throughout the Ottoman Empire they were called köfte; in Sweden, köttbullar; in Belgium they were boulettes de viande and gehaktballen; in Finland, meatballs were called lihapullia, literally “meat buns”; in Ukraine, they were frykadel’ky.
And, in Italy, they were polpette. So that’s what we called our restaurant. Polpette della Nonna. My grandmother’s meatballs.
The grandmother in question was my late husband, Damien’s. My beloved’s nonna had died the year before we opened our restaurant, and we found a yellowed Tupperware of meatballs in the back of her freezer while cleaning out her house. The very last batch she would ever make.
“She made the most incredible meatballs,” Damien told me, cradling that container as though it was precious. “But she never wrote down her recipe. I’ve been trying to re-create it my whole life.”
It took Damien years to deconstruct his nonna’s meatballs. Every week he would make them alongside his traditional Sunday gravy: tomato sauce and sausage and braciole. I still remember the rich aroma of ripe tomatoes, the freshly chopped basil, the sizzle of garlic and onions, sautéed to perfection in glistening olive oil.
While the sauce cooked, my love would toil over his own batch of meatballs, carefully measuring the breadcrumbs and soaking them in milk, rolling them together with veal and pork and beef. At the very last moment, he’d throw one of his nonna’s frozen meatballs into the tomato sauce and we would test them side by side, his against hers.
Hers always won. They were better than anything else my talented husband put in that pot.
Until the day they weren’t.
“How did you do it?” His family were the first to ask, and then the people who came to our restaurant. And then, after he was gone, the world.
What was his recipe? It made me smile when people would inevitably ask that question at every signing I ever did for one of my own cookbooks, at every event. It was a small, beautiful way of keeping him alive, of keeping him with me.
What was the secret ingredient? Do you know? What did he put in those meatballs that made them so good?
If my husband knew anything, it was how to keep a secret. But I was there the whole time. I shared his kitchen. I helped him stir and measure. I stood beside him as he perfected the recipe. I saw exactly how he did it.
And I’ve never been that good with secrets. I plan on telling you everything.
