The Dead Husband Cookbook
Celebrity chef Maria Capello built a culinary empire on her famous meatballs — and on the decades-old mystery of her vanished husband. When he disappeared, the media was quick to whisper that Maria had murdered him, and darker still that there was a grisly reason his body was never found.
Now Maria says she's finally ready to tell all. She summons Thea Woods — an editor whose career is hanging by a thread after a very public scandal — to the Capello family's isolated farm to ghostwrite her tell-all memoir. As Thea works, the story unspools across two timelines: her own uneasy days at the Farm, and the pages of Maria's manuscript, The Secret Ingredient. The deeper Thea digs into the family's past, the clearer it becomes that some recipes were never meant to be written down.
A darkly funny, twist-filled thriller often compared to Gone Girl and Knives Out, The Dead Husband Cookbook serves up unreliable narrators, buried secrets, and a very literal question of what went into Maria's most celebrated dish.
Disgraced editor hired to ghostwrite Maria's memoir.
Celebrity chef whose husband vanished decades earlier; now writing a tell-all memoir.
Maria's husband, whose disappearance and never-found body drive the mystery.