“You could leave with dreams and expectations that by their nature were counter to your own best interest. Better to go with an open mind and take what comes and see what you can make of it.” – David Guterson, The Final Case.
I love the detective/mystery (D/M) genre. My first introduction was Perry Mason, the crime and legal series by Erle Stanley Gardner. We had a few books lying around the house while growing up. I devoured them with intense delight, trying as much as I could to finish them right away. But I was never a fast reader, so although every Perry Mason book was slim, it took me a week or so to finish reading it.
When I immigrated to Canada my reading landscape of the D/M genre became expansive. There were Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Homes, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple and Edgar Allan Poe’s hair-raising stories. Tired of reading, I switched to television to watch Murder, She Wrote whose main character, Miss Jessica Fletcher, would be involved in solving the murders in every place she went. If I were her friend, I would worry and be scared for my life every time she came to visit.
Then in June 1988, an unknown writer published his first novel entitled A Time to Kill, a legal thriller. I was hooked and wanted more and John Grisham didn’t disappoint. He followed with: The Firm, The Client, The Pelican Brief, The Rainmaker, The Chamber and much more. He’s become a prolific writer and his books are always in the bestsellers’ list.
As a subscriber of The Toronto Star, I once enjoyed reading Linwood Barclay’s humorist satires mostly about his family. But he left The Star without explanation. Then in 2007, he reappeared in the public eye when he published a mystery book entitled No Time for Goodbye. Every year since then, except in 2020, he wrote books that drew interest in Canada and internationally. He must be a millionaire by now.
During one of my sleepless nights, I was thinking of a mystery plot that I could turn into a story. The next morning I wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget. Immediately, I was dreaming to be the first writer sleuth, Filipino style in North America.
But that dream had vanished before I could even begin. A young upstart beat me to it. Her name is Mia P. Manansala. She’s described as a “writer and book coach from Chicago who loves books, baking, and badass women. She uses humor (and murder) to explore aspects of the Filipino diaspora, queerness, and her millennial love for pop culture.” She called her three D/M books A Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mystery. I was curious to find out if her books would be a page turner and entertaining.
*****
Manansala’s amateur sleuth is Lila Macapagal, a broken-hearted twenty-five year old who is moving back to her hometown of Shady Palms, a two-hour drive from Chicago. Her family owns the Tita Rosie Kitchen in the downtown area and she’s helping her Tita Rosie and Lola Flor operate the restaurant as a way of restarting her life, instead of owning a café in Chicago. Lila’s parents are dead. But aside from Tita Rosie and Lola Flor, she has an extended family that includes “a bevy of gossiping aunties, none as loud or nosy as the group of fiftysomething year-old women I privately referred to as ‘the Calendar Crew’. Their names were April, Mae, and June – they weren’t related, but all three of them were completely interchangeable, down to their bad perms, love of floral patterns, and need to provide running commentary on my life…Like most Filipino families, we extended that relationship to any close family friend. So even though I was an only child, I had enough godmothers, cousins, aunties, and uncles to populate a small village. Or at least a relatively small town that began to feel smaller and more suffocating the older I got.”
The first book is Arsenic and Adobo (2021). In just few pages of reading the book, death occurs right away in Tita Rosie Kitchen of all places. Aside from a romance failure, bad luck seems to follow Lila. The victim’s name is Derek Winter, an ex-boyfriend of Lila. He is also the town’s food blogger and critic for the local paper. He’s having a brunch at Tita Rosie Kitchen with his stepfather, Mr. Long, the landlord of the plaza where Tita Rosie Kitchen is located. They have finished eating the pork and chicken adobo (what else) and are into their desserts when Derek convulses and plants his face into the dish while Lila is clearing the plates from their table. He dies of poisoning.
Lila becomes the prime suspect when a small trace of arsenic is found in an open bag of rice, and a duffel bag belonging to Lila contains cash and pills. Out on bail, Lila, together with her friend Adeena Awan, starts interviewing restaurant owners who may have a motive to kill Derek. Lila finds out that Derek is involved in some kind of a money scheme. Derek writes a bad review of a restaurant, a health inspector comes to find faults in the operation of the restaurant then recommends a contractor to fix things up before the restaurant can reopen. Lila also uncovers an affair between Derek and a married woman.
*****
Beauty pageant is always a cultural staple of the Filipino diaspora. So it’s not surprising that the second book, Homicide and Halo-Halo (2022), is setting a Miss Teen Shady Palms Pageant as its backdrop for the next murder.
Lila Macapagal is now the new owner of the Brew-ha Café together with her friend Adeena Awan and Adeena’s girlfriend Elena Torres. They are all busy preparing for the opening of their café, except that Lila has accepted to be a judge in the three-member pageant committee in order to get the contract of providing the catering service for all pageant events, including free booth and advertising at the Founder’s Day Festival.
Lila was once a beauty pageant winner as well. She bested her cousin (not by blood) Bernadette of all people to win the title. It resulted in their constant bickering and animosity towards one another. When her mother died, Lila avoided being part of the beauty pageant world again. Yet circumstances pushed her into it. She remembered when her mother “had pushed me into one contest after another when I was a kid, determined that I would pick up where she had left off.” She also thought about the pressure to win “where beauty was the only commodity a girl had, where a single slipup – in heels, in hitting the wrong note during your talent portion, with a boy – could somehow be enough to derail all the hopes and dreams your mother had heaped onto your shoulders.”
While Lila and Sana Williams (another judge of the pageant) are jogging down the Riverwalk and approaching the little footbridge to a river, Lila’s dog Longganisa starts barking. There’s a floating body and it belongs to Rob Thompson, the last judge of the pageant, no pun intended.
The Thompson family is a big name in Shady Palms for owning several businesses, such as sporting goods store and construction. It has funded the Miss Teen Shady Palms Pageant since its inception. When he was young, Rob Thompson was involved in several scandals connected with the pageant. Years later, his peccadillo would play a factor in his murder. On the night of “Getting to Know You” potluck for the contestants and their parents, Rob seems to be hitting on Joy, a contestant who is being coached by Bernadette. Bernadette calls him out and threatens to kill him. It so happens that there’s full of witnesses and they inform the cops about the incident. Once again, a family member is the prime suspect and Lila must investigate.
*****
“What is it about your family that just brings the most drama ever? Did your ancestors break a promise to a wise woman and get cursed? Because it’s really starting to feel like it,” Adeena asks. In response, Lila says “if there’s a family curse, its name is Ronnie. I knew his showing up after all these years would lead to trouble.” Thus, we come to the third book Blackmail and Bibingka (2022) which completes the trilogy.
Ronnie is the long-lost prodigal son of Tita Rosie who left Shady Palms fifteen years ago. He has come back as one of the owners (the others are Pete Miller and Isabel Ramos-Garcia) of the Shady Palms Winery. But he carries with him a troublesome past. Right away Tita Rosie is the target of blackmail when she receives an email warning her that “Ronnie Flores and Co. have blood on their hands. Pay $50,000 or the world will know what they did in Florida.”
The blackmail is not the story; after all, the trilogy is about murders. In few pages, one of Ronnie and his partners’ investor, Dennis Sutton, dies as a result of methanol poisoning injected in a bottle of lambanog. Lila, of course, must do the sleuthing because “my snooping had a purpose more noble than gossip (p.150)” and “I knew I couldn’t stop investigating (p.167).” There’s no doubt Lila will figure out the “who” and the “why” of the murder.
*****
I must say I concur that Mia Manansala has written a “quirky cozy mystery” which also introduces the readers of the many mouth-watering Filipino dishes and desserts. It is one of a kind of a mystery series to have the appetites satisfied while at the same time the murders are being solved. This is not the end, however, of Lila’s sleuthing. Mia has written a fourth book entitled Murder and Mamon. I look forward to reading this, too, as soon as I get a copy from the Pickering Library.
21 September 2023