A chilling murder mystery, a poignant exploration of the emotional demands of motherhood, and a celebration of food in all its mouthwatering glory.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Danielle Valentine’s The Dead Husband Cookbook, which is out August 5th 2025.
When infamous chef, restauranter, and television personality Maria Capello’s husband died, the media circus was intense…and quick to cast the blame. Whispers claimed Maria murdered her husband to build her culinary empire on his bones, and that there was an all-too-grisly reason his body was never recovered. Yet for the past few decades, the Capello family maintained their stoney silence—until now.
Thea Woods has no idea why she was chosen to work with Maria on her sure-to-be-infamous memoir, but she doesn’t question her luck. Spirited away to the Capello’s rustic upstate farm, she’s soon embroiled in the mystery—and cut off from the rest of the world. It should be the job of a lifetime, but something’s not quite right with the close-knit clan, and Damien Capello isn’t the only one to go mysteriously missing over the years. As the true story of Maria’s past unfolds and the stench of rot hidden behind the kind coastal grandmother veneer rises, Thea finds herself trapped…and desperately afraid.
Because there are reasons why Damien’s body was never found…and why, in over thirty years, Maria Capello has never revealed the secret ingredient in her most famous recipe.
Someone was cooking. I smelled it the second I walked into our building, a rich and heady scent of meat and onions and garlic simmering together in a pot. My mouth filled with saliva, and for a moment, I forgot all about my wet shoes, the throbbing pain in my shoulder, my weighted- down tote bag and screaming toddler.
Maybe it’s Jacob, I thought, hopeful. Maybe my husband had stepped away from work early for once, picked up one of my old cookbooks, and decided to make dinner. Stranger things have happened.
Ruthie’s voice cut through my thoughts. “MOMMY, MOMMY, MOMMY, MOMMY!” She was always either screaming at the top of her lungs or speaking in a such a low mumble that I had to ask her several times to “please talk just a little louder, honey.”
“Ruthie, Ruthie, Ruthie!” I said in my normal tone, hoping she’d take the hint. The entryway door slammed shut behind us, and I paused, taking a moment to adjust all the things I was carrying: the Hanes Press tote swollen with books; the still-open, drenched umbrella; the reusable grocery bag filled with overpriced bodega staples (toilet paper, milk, the carton of blueberries that currently com-posed 90 percent of Ruthie’s diet); and, of course, Ruthie herself.
“Mommy, did you see the jamrock?” She was trying to say shamrock. It was a week or so before St. Patrick’s Day, and our neighbor had one taped to her front door.
“I did see the shamrock. It’s very pretty.” I was starting to lose the feeling in my right arm. “Do you think you could try walking for a little while, sweetie?”
Ruthie responded by wrapping her arms tighter around my neck and wailing directly into my ear. She’d insisted on being carried half-way through our walk home. She hadn’t liked the wet ground, and she’d wanted to be closer to the umbrella. I couldn’t blame her. I also hated walking around Brooklyn in the rain. But we were inside now, facing four floors of stairs, and I was not an athletic person. My sole experience with working out consisted of a weight-lifting class I’d taken in my late twenties, the optimistically named “Couch to Barbell.” It had promised to turn me into a weightlifter in just three sessions a week for twelve weeks. We hadn’t even started with real weights. We’d started with a broom handle, which the instructor explained was for learning proper weight-lifting form and not building muscle.
I made it to the fourth session before pulling something in my shoulder. From lifting a broom handle. I’d been so embarrassed I never went back, which had meant forfeiting the $195 fee I’d paid in advance, a fortune back when I was on an assistant editor salary. I still felt a twinge of regret whenever I thought of it.
From somewhere within my tote, a sharp chime sounded. It was the specific tone I’d programmed for when my boss emailed— a short, clear, efficient-sounding chirp, like the sound of an old- fashioned metal call bell sitting on a hotel’s reception desk. Whenever I heard it, I imagined Cassandra Hanes placing a single, elegantly manicured finger on a bell, eyebrows raised as she waited for me to give her my full attention. I used to hear that sound multiple times an hour as Cassandra emailed an inside joke or shot me a question about some high-profile project or checked to see if I wanted to grab lunch or a drink. Now, the sound shot a quick jolt of nerves up my spine. Lately, any email Cassandra had for me wasn’t good.
The smell of food grew stronger as I hauled Ruthie up the stairs. It coated the insides of my nostrils so that each time I inhaled it was even more intoxicating. It was earthy mushrooms and rosemary, the sharp tang of mustard, all of it tempered with the honeyed sweetness of caramelized onions. Heavenly.
“Mommy, what’s that smell?” Ruthie asked.
“Someone’s cooking dinner. It smells like a roast.”
Ruthie screwed up her face. “Eww. It’s yucky.”
“Yucky?” I laughed, amused that Ruthie’s palate hadn’t yet caught up to complex tastes and textures and scents.
But as I climbed further, I started to notice it, too. There was something beneath the heavy smell of the meat, something cloying. It reminded me of dying flowers, of fruit going soft in the basket we kept in the corner of our kitchen, and I found myself making the same face Ruthie had, even trying to breathe through my mouth.
Whoever was cooking had done a lot with the mushrooms and onions, but beneath that wonderful smell was something else, something too sweet. The meat they were cooking had gone bad.
It didn’t smell like food anymore. It smelled like rot. Like the decay of dying things.
“This is why you couldn’t come down and help us?” I asked Jacob when Ruthie and I had finally stumbled into our apartment. He was in workout clothes, his forehead red and shiny with sweat.
“I was in the middle of a set,” he explained, breathless. He was panting, face flushed. “I just did ten reps. That’s a personal best.”
I could tell he wanted me to congratulate him, but I didn’t have it in me. Our apartment was a fourth floor walk-up. Standard, for a place in Brooklyn in our budget. Not a big deal when you’re in your twenties; hell when you have a kid, groceries, and a tote bag filled with books to carry.
Oh, and an umbrella. I also had an umbrella.
I glowered at Jacob as he refocused his attention on the pull-up bar hanging from the kitchen doorway. My husband was tall and slender with lean, ropy muscles, dark, wiry hair, and a long nose. The first time we met, he’d reminded me of a dog, a majestic Irish setter loping around some verdant green field, a hunting dog with a job to do, places to see, things to sniff out. It was an association that has only grown stronger the longer I’ve known him.
A podcast droned from the speaker in the kitchen. Something about World War II. Jacob was the only person I knew who worked out while listening to history podcasts.
“If you really needed help, you should have said.” Jacob spoke loudly so I could hear him over the podcast hosts, who were now discussing something called Operation Pedestal. “I didn’t realize you were carrying so much.”
The text I’d sent had literally read, Please come help me I don’t think I can carry all this up, but I was too distracted to point that out, trying to get Ruthie to take off her shoes and coat while she twirled in a lackadaisical circle in the middle of our entryway, singing three words of that song from Frozen, the only lyrics she knew: “I can’t any-more!” They weren’t the right words, but she didn’t know that.
“Ruthie, c’mon,” I said. “Let’s get you out of your wet outside clothes.”
“Mommy, I’m Elsa. I’m dancing.” I finished pulling off her jacket and she darted into the apartment like a puppy finally released from her leash.
I collapsed against the wall. The effort of the climb and the jacket and all of the things clambering for my attention was too much. My bones were tired.
I looked up at Jacob without moving my head from the wall. “Something was going on at the office when I left. Final bids, I think.”
“Bids for the top- secret…Beyoncé memoir?” Jacob grunted, hauling his chin up to the pull- up bar.
I considered it, then shook my head. “I don’t think they would’ve been able to keep a celebrity that big under wraps. Someone would’ve let something slip.” Not to me, of course. Talking to me was still verboten. I hadn’t heard a word about the submission that’d come in Monday, but I’ve been at Hanes long enough to note the signs: the closed-door meetings with the heads of every department, Cassandra hanging around more than usual, shades drawn over the glass walls of her office, assistants hovering at the printers, waiting for pages to spit out so they could secret them away before anyone’s greedy eyes fell on the words. Most editors read on their computers, but Cassandra insisted on ink and paper. She said reading was as much a tactile experience as a mental one. I used to wonder if she huffed printer ink when she was alone in her office. I really did.
And then there’d been the assistants in the bathroom who hadn’t realized I was squatting in one of the stalls, their hushed whispers bouncing off the tiled walls, “Have you read The Dead Husband Cookbook yet?” and “No, have you?”
The Dead Husband Cookbook. It was a fake name, obviously, and didn’t necessarily refer to an actual cookbook. Once upon a time, Cassandra and I would have come up with it together, making a joke of some throwaway line or image in the proposal, laughing until we were breathless. I felt an ache now, remembering. Had she called another editor in to her office to help her come up with this one? A new mentee to replace the one who’d failed her so miserably? The thought turned my stomach. I blinked, hard, to keep tears from forming.
Jacob looked like he was going to say something else, then decided against it and went back to the pull-up bar. “Ruthie’s school called. Did you send in tuition this month?”
I went back to unpacking the bodega groceries. “Not yet.”
“You want me to do it?”
“No,” I said a bit too sharply. Then, adjusting my tone, “It’s fine. I’ll do it.”
Watching him at the bar, I felt my teeth grit together. He’d gotten off before six for once, and instead of starting dinner or putting the dishes away, he’d used the time to work out. But it wasn’t worth the fight, so I did my best to push the annoyance aside. I scanned my shelves of cookbooks, trying to come up with an idea for dinner. The smell of the hallway meat, though rotten, had inspired me to cook.
I pulled The Italian Family Table down from a shelf. My go-to cookbook since forever. It was hopelessly dated, a faded photograph of the famous chef Maria Capello standing in a Tuscan- style kitchen, all rustic wood and terra- cotta floors, Maria wielding a rolling pin like a weapon. It was by far the most tattered and worn of all my cookbooks. It had been my mother’s originally, but I’d taken it with me when I moved away for college, reasoning that it was only fair. Maria had spent more time raising me than my mother had, after all. And I’d never even met her.
The book automatically fell open to a recipe near the middle, manicotti stuffed with braised meat and besciamella, my favorite since I was little. I could still remember making it on Sunday nights during a brief, disastrous year where I’d tried to get my mother to play- act like the two of us were a real family. Dragging a dining room chair across the kitchen so I could stir the meat on the back burner, watching cheese bubble and brown through the dirty glass of the oven. I owed my mother a call, actually. She’d tried to get me over lunch, but I’d let it go to voicemail. The longer I put her off, the worse the call was going to be.
I scanned the ingredients list, though I knew it by heart. I had pasta and pork, and I even had a jar of Capello besciamella sauce, Maria’s brand, which was inevitably better than anything I made regardless of how closely I followed the recipe.
“How do you feel about manicotti?” I asked Jacob.
“You know that dish is the reason I married you,” he said.
He meant it as a joke and I smiled dutifully. But it hit different today. Maybe it was just that I used to know I contributed more to the world than a meal I’d made following someone else’s recipe. Now, I wasn’t so sure.
It wasn’t until much later in the evening, when the manicotti had been made and eaten, when Ruthie was in her favorite pajamas— the Hanna Anderson footie ones covered in lemons, so old we’d had to cut the feet off when she outgrew them— and I was brushing my teeth for bed, thinking about how I’d avoided calling my mother yet again and I really needed to just get it over with, that I remembered I’d gotten an email from Cassandra.
Something foul took root in my stomach as I fumbled for my phone, opened the email, and read. I’d known this email was coming, but the words were still like a punch to the gut. Tears pricked infuriatingly at my eyes. I felt like I needed to sit down.
The email read simply: My office, first thing tomorrow morning.
Which was, of course, the exact email you got before you were informed that you were being let go.
