Barbacoa, Bomba, and Betrayal

 

Barbacoa, Bomba, and Betrayal is the third Caribbean Kitchen cozy mystery by Raquel V. Reyes. Released 8th Nov 2023 by Crooked Lane, it's 320 pages and is available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links.

This is a fun cozy mystery full of food, culture, and (as the author herself refers to it) "Spanglish" phrases. The amateur sleuth is also a cultural anthropologist with a specialization in food culture and also the host of her own youtube channel and network cooking show. The plotting moves along at a good clip and I never found myself yanked out of the story by clunky dialogue or uneven writing. There is a fair amount of Spanish in the story, more than usual for a mainstream cozy, but almost all of it is either easy to understand in context or explained by character responses.

The central characters are appealing, well rounded and largely female. There are a phenomenal number of food descriptions included and the author has an impressive grasp of ingredients and history for the relevant dishes and their importance to the different cultures who developed them. There's a lot of really interesting food history to be found here. 

This volume sees MC Miriam traveling to visit her parents in the Dominican Republic. She's soon dragged into a multi-thread mystery with property sabotage, potential stalking, and disappearances.  She's also 5 months pregnant and the shenanigans she gets up to are not, strictly speaking, medically sound. The climax, resolution, and denouement are self contained in this volume, so it works well as a standalone. The violence is mostly off-page and not extreme, given that it's a cozy mystery.

The book includes several delicious and intriguing recipes which are also featured in the media scenes from her cooking show.

The unabridged audiobook runs 9 hours 1 minute and is very well narrated by Frankie Corzo. She has a rich alto voice and does the accents and Spanish parts (and "Spanglish") perfectly well.

Four stars. 

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