Courting Disaster: An Angie Amalfi Mystery (ISBN 0060502916)

Amusing, some romance, and welll-plotted:
The detective of this San Francisco-set mystery (and that is a big part of the charm) is Angie, a woman with enough money that she doesn't need to work, which is a good thing because she's not very good at holding down a job despite her ability as a cordon bleu cook. Angie is engaged to a homicide detective. Her mother is planning their engagement party, and the fact that the party is a secret from Angie is driving her crazy -- she's trying to find out where the party is, the theme, etc. But the real mystery plot involves what's going on in a Greek waterfront restaurant. Angie's neighbor and friend Stan "discovers" the restaurant and falls in love with a pregnant woman associated with the restaurant. She turns to Stan for help and Angie gets involved. Before they know it, they're involved in some puzzling things going on at the restaurant, including trouble coming from the baby's father. THen there's Angie's father, who is being stalked by an employee but doesn't want his wife or daughter to know -- so the father seeks out the help of Paavo, Angie's fiance. As you can tell, there's lots of stuff going on in this book, enough so that the reader moves around among multiple plot lines. It's not difficult to follow, however, in part because the characters are such...characters. Larger than life and likeable, except for the villains. I intend to read more in the series -- although there are enough in the series that I will be busy for a while.

oddly entertaining:
This series is hard to describe, in that the "heroine" is so stupid that you can't really like her, but the other characters more than make up for her. Is the reader supposed to like Angie and identify with her, or dislike her, or what? She's irritating in that she can't hold a job but acts like the world owes her something. She sponges off her parents, but thinks she deserves to live in luxury. It's impossible to imagine that any man would put up with her for long. But Paavo is an appealing character, as are Angie's family members, her neighbor Stan, the other police officers that Paavo works with, and Angie's friend who owns the gift shop. This book is an improvement on others in the series: it has less Angie and more of everybody else.

Slow start.:
Meet Angie Amalfi, chef and freelance food critic. With her "surprise" engagement party around the corner, Angie is in a whirlwind of motion trying to figure out the details. Then a mysterious woman appears at her neighbor's door. Angie's neighbor is named Stan. He has just been drawn into the life of this woman and her baby. Now Angie must help the woman and Stan out of a murderous baby smuggling ring. **** A slow start but by the end it was a worthwhile read! Angie and Stan's antics are enough to capture any reader's attention. **** Reviewed by K. Blair.

Strikingly obvious time-waster:
There was little to recommend this book except that it reads easily. Pages fly by like hours in an airport. The mystery was dead predictable in form, although the other might keep us guessing as to the exact details, and the characters are so wooden one worries about a fire hazard. The recipes were great, but I get the feeling the authors and readers who prefer this kind of book do not have much in common with the real world. I would not recommend this to anyone who is not stranded in an airport and wealthy.

Burgundy Complexity; A Fine Red Wine With Surefire Finish:
Joanne Pence's Angie Amalfi continues delighting this reader with variations on plugging in her talent as a trained (trapped?) gourmet chef, and through humorously portrayed angst on this-and-that, especially around her mother's interjections of suggested direction. In COURTING DISASTER Angie frets over an engagement party Serefina (her mother) is planning in high profile secrecy. Angie is consumed with desperation to discover the diddly details of her mother's choices of color schemes, etc., related to this upcoming party. I was absolutely taken by surprise and overwhelmingly impressed with the way Angie's well-fed angst over the perfection of her party's ambiance, carried on entertainingly throughout the novel, was concluded in the denouement. Do check out how everyone's Dressed To The Nines? But, from which base number system are they making their debuts? That is the question. Or, one of the many which are answered absolutely. From the first page to the last, this mystery was more sophisticated that most offerings in this genre. The burgundy complexity sneaks up on a reader who's been fooled into feeling he's in the book only for the exquisitely executed "let's party" escapism. All within the justification of escorting a villain to his or her payment of karma, of course. The opening of the novel does a moody-blues, literarily stylish, sensitive step-in as Angie's seemingly superficial friend, Stanfield Bonnette, drags his psyche through a self-pity soliloquy, moaning with such gregarious gusto that temptations of Prozac would be magnetically repelled before they could find an ozone hole for access to mental persuasion. After a few pages of this, Stan has taken the reader into a submarine dive into the murky depths of his unusual character; there's more to him than even he would admit. The Classic opening scene of antique detective fiction describes with sensual sleaze the quintessential dumpy motel room's open window on a red-neon-light blinking to a slow-two-step, keeping rhythm with the hero's nearly dead heart ... beat. The essence (sans motel room ambiance) of that type of urban-fringe, jazzed-up-depression, turning downtrodden into a sought-after art form, is captured in Stan's sensitive soliloquy. Thumbs up for a great Act One, Scene One, Pence! And kiss my joined finger tips in salute for the performances of the generous collection of characters reeking in "Perfecto" personality quirks, and the read-aloud-and-share dialogue dances. Of course the women in the plot are delightfully or dingily feisty and varied in temperament, depth, and essence; but the coup beyond coups in this novel is that every male in the plot is an unusually rich, complex example of that gender of the species. Each is potently, yummy male, yet uniquely one-of-a-kind. The contrast of enlightened-macho-styles between Angie's fiancee, Paavo, and her father is especially well done. I was absolutely entertained by every word, gesture, and action exchanged between those two as they bungled from antipasto antipathy into side-glancing, no-admitting-it thoughts of, "maybe-I'm-gonna-like-you-after-all ... or ... then-again-maybe-not" intimacy. There are too many sub-intrigues and character sets to begin to describe the multiplicity of duplicities woven into one of the tightest, densest, most luxurious carpets of Persian (Excuse, Italian) perfection to be found metaphor-ed into fiction. - There's Stan and his truly varied (and insightful) relationships with several women, including Angie, and none of these connections come close to superficiality, except maybe the wise avoidance of "tap-dancing" with Nora. - There's the sensitively and realistically explored social issue of baby's born, sold, or delivered to unworthy or incapable parents, contrasted to a fresh look at true parenting, out-of-the-box but in the ball park of "Yes, that'll work," providing the contented conclusion, "This child's lucky." - There are issues of intimacy, approach/avoidance complexes therein, along with "how-to"s on getting there between friends of either gender combos, between parents and children, between heterosexual partners, among every-which-way of one-on-one dances through life. How does Pence deliver this amount of intrigue and intensity through a legitimate mystery, filling in the blanks of that genre, yet using it as a cover for a literary mainstream novel? She does it with the pizzaz of light, fun humor and the panache of a visceral awareness of how spirited people get "up close and personal"; how they relate and grow satisfyingly close, simultaneous to working the kinks out of life's hard-lines and hardships. Well done, Pence!! You appear to be one of those alfalfa type authors who taproots her work 40 feet into the earth, and grows along with her talent in mineral rich soil. With Respect, Linda G. Shelnutt