Public Anchovy #1 (Deep Dish Mysteries, #3)

by Mindy Quigley

While Geneva Bay’s upper crust gets ready to party down at a Prohibition-themed fundraiser, pizza chef Delilah O’Leary is focused on seeing her struggling restaurant through the winter slow season. The temperature outside is plummeting, but Delilah’s love life might finally be heating up, as hunky police detective Calvin Capone seems poised (finally) to make a move.

But Delilah’s hopes of perfecting a new “free-from” pizza recipe for a charity bash are dashed when a dead body crashes the party. Soon, Capone, Delilah, and her entire staff are trapped in an isolated mansion and embroiled in a dangerous game of cat and mouse.

To catch an increasingly-desperate killer, Delilah will have to top all of her previous crime-solving accomplishments, and a few pizzas, too.

• ISBN10: 1250792479
• ISBN13: 9781250792471
• Publish Date: 12 February 2024
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: St Martin's Press
• Imprint: St. Martin's Paperbacks
• Format: Paperback (US Mass Market)
• Pages: 320
• Language: English
• URL: http://melia.co.uk/page/detail/?k=9781250792471

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally posted on my blog Nonstop Reader.

Public Anchovy #1 is the third Deep Dish cozy mystery by Mindy Quigley. Released 26th Dec 2023 by Macmillan on their St. Martin's Press imprint, it's 320 pages and will be available in mass market paperback, audio, and ebook formats. Large print paperback due out from the same publisher in May 2024. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links.

This is an engaging light cozy series with an appealing female protagonist pizza-shop owner and her partner and best friend Sonya, a chubby tabby cat, and a predilection for stumbling over mysteries. It's full of the sort of small town quirky eccentric characters which populate shopfront cozies. 

This one has a well rendered limited suspect pool isolated setting with a high end charity dinner in an isolated mansion gone very wrong. The denouement and resolution are satisfyingly self-contained in this book and it works well as a standalone. There are currently 3 books in the ongoing series and it would also work quite well as a binge/buddy read. A fourth volume is due out in mid fourth quarter 2024 from the same publisher.

There are more than the usual number of pizza themed recipes included in the back of the book including some very fancy (and detailed) dishes based on non-ingredients: gluten free, dairy free "parmesan" etc.

Four stars. Highly recommended for fans of humorous light shopfront cozies like those from Ellie Alexander, Laurie Cass, and Peggy Ehrhart. 

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes. 

[chymerra]

I wasn't sure about this book when I first started reading it. But, as the book went on and the mystery was revealed, I liked it. The author did a great job of keeping who the murderer was up in the air. I am usually good at figuring things out, and I was surprised at who the killer was and what the motive was behind the killings. I could have done without the romance (it seemed forced).