I knew I was going to love this book. First, I’ve enjoyed every book by Valentine I’ve read. She has a very fun, relatable writing style, and her premises are so unique. And second, as an avid Food Network enthusiast, a book about a chef who may or may not have murdered her husband is right up my alley.

And I was right - I did love this! It’s such a clever story, and I loved delving into the mystery. I also really appreciated the recipes scattered throughout the book, many of which I will definitely be trying because they sound delicious. This story is funny and atmospheric and eventful, and you should one hundred percent check it out!

Thank you to Sourcebooks and Netgalley for this ARC. The Dead Husband Cookbook is out August 5th!

4.5/5 stars

This book was phenomenal. I loved every part of it from the characters, the secrets, the hidden agendas, and the fast-paced storytelling that kept me flying through the pages. I wasn’t totally shocked by the relationship between Maria and Thea’s husband, I was hoping for something like that to happen I just wasn’t sure if it was going to be him. Danielle Valentine made it impossible to put this book down. She served up suspense with a side of betrayal and I ate up every bit.

This deliciously wicked thriller took me completely by surprise! With a celebrity chef, a missing husband, and rumors that swirl like smoke over a simmering pot, this one had all the nail-biting suspense I crave in a thriller—with a rich layer of emotional depth underneath.

Set in chilling isolation and steeped in a darkly atmospheric tone, the story explores the emotional toll of motherhood, the secrets we bury, and the power of food as both comfort and weapon. I loved how it mixed psychological suspense with foodie flair—truly a foodie thriller like no other!

I’ll admit: the title and cover made me hesitate (I’m not a fan of gruesome visuals), but I’m so glad I gave it a chance. Danielle Valentine is a masterful storyteller, and this one is smart, sharp, and full of twists.

🍴 Favorite quote:
“I’ve always said recipes are like family. Even the best ones are hiding something.”

🔪 If you like thrillers with bite, this one serves up a full course of secrets and suspense!

Thank you Sourcebooks Landmark and NetGalley for this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Thea Woods has been personally chosen to edit the memoir of celebrity chef Maria Capello. This is an opportunity of a lifetime that might be able to help Thea get the promotion she has been eyeing for a while. The only catch is that Thea has to make sure Maria writes about what really happened the night her husband Damien Capello died. Rumors have always surrounded Maria and now is the time to get answers. Will Thea find out the truth and why was she personally chosen for the job?

The title and the cover caught my eye right away. The Dead Husband Cookbook is a contemporary mystery with great drama and a love story that will keep you reading late into the night. When Thea would receive a chapter from Maria, I was just as excited as the character to read about how this woman created an empire after the death of her famous husband. I would have enjoyed more chapters about the past and her career because author Danielle Valentine did an amazing job creating Maria Capello. There were some fun twists and moments that had my heart racing.

If you love food, drama, and a juicy mystery…. Pick up your copy August 5, 2025.

I received a DIGITAL Advance Reader Copy of this book from #NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I absolutely devoured this book. I previously read Delicate Condition by this author and didn't think much of it but this book was amazing in comparison.

There were so many creepy elements in this book and it kept you on your toes the entire time. I couldn't put this book down and read it all in one day.

Loved how there were recipes sprinkled throughout. A bit of a twist at the end that was a wth. I felt like some characters were not fleshed out enough.

The Dead Husband’s Cookbook is a masterful feast of domestic suspense, served with chilling intrigue and memorable flavors. As a registered dietitian, I was intrigued by this book's premise! It features celebrity chef Maria Capello, a lively and mysterious personality, who chooses to finally speak out about her husband’s disappearance in a memoir that also shares her signature recipes. She invites Thea Woods, a former promising publishing editor eager to revive her career, to her secluded Upstate New York farm to help finalize the manuscript.

Thea Woods is a clever, resourceful editor who finds herself in an eerie house filled with secrets and no cell service or Wi-Fi. As Thea examines Maria’s chapters, which are provided one at a time and range from personal anecdotes to tantalizing recipes, she becomes increasingly uneasy. The manuscript’s tone shifts from cheerful culinary wisdom to tense unease, especially as Maria recounts her husband Damien’s disappearance thirty years ago, raising troubling questions. Was it a tragic accident or something more sinister?

Readers receive glimpses of the memoir mixed with recipes, creating a distinctive three-course meal narrative structure. Valentine combines genres—memoir, cookbook, and thriller—in an exceptionally captivating, twisty, and addictive story.

If you enjoy psychological thrillers set in domestic spaces, especially those centered around food, this is perfect for you. The Dead Husband’s Cookbook is a deliciously dark, multi-layered thriller: a chef’s memoir intertwined with recipes and potential lies. Under Thea’s careful editorial eye, readers are served a meal you can’t put down—and might not want to finish, once you discover what’s been simmering beneath the surface. Be sure to pick up your copy on August 5th!

Thank you Netgalley & Sourcebooks for my eARC!
Posted initially on BookshelfbyTori on Instagram!

This is gothic horror with a modern palette. The Dead Husband Cookbook serves suspense in courses, building its tension like layers.

This book was very different than any I’ve read before. What was unique about it were the Italian food recipes in between the chapters that flowed with the story line.

There was so much mystery behind what happened to Damien. I had drawn my own conclusions, but I was really shocked at some of the twists. Maria’s memoir tells one side of the story that is totally questionable as to what actually happened.

The more Thea uncovered and the more people she spoke to that were connected to the Capello’s, the more the story started to really come together. Thea had always been a fan of Maria’s since she was little. Writing this memoir would help her tarnished career, but it also gave her the chance to get that much closer to Maria and her truth. What I wasn’t ready for, was how these two women were actually connected and it blew my mind.

I definitely recommend giving this one a read. There are some gruesome bits in it, but if you don’t mind a little gore, then this one is for you 🖤

Rumors have always flew about famous celebrity chef, Marie Capello and her husband’s mysterious death. Now that is willing to write a book about her life will the truth come out?

This was an interesting and unique mystery. The pages flew by. I particularly enjoyed the recipes within the story, at the perfect moments. I loved Marie’s chapters, especially as they got more and more dramatic.

“Every family has a secret ingredient. Even if it’s just the love you have for one another.”

The Dead Husband Cookbook comes out 8/5.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC of this novel. This was a highly readable, intricately-plotted, fun, fun read. I tore through it. The first three-quarters of the book were spooky and kept you guessing. The POVs started switching in the last quarter of the book, which kind of ruined the mood, but kept the plot twisting until the end. There were certainly eye roll moments in the last quarter but it was still entertaining. Danielle Valentine writes the best summer novels.

What the heck did I just read??? This book had me questioning everything from beginning to end, I was going through it just as much as Thea was lol. This is an example that we should never meet our idols. Thea is going through it financially, and also going through it in her home. She was given the opportunity of a lifetime and it was to edit a memoir for her idol Maria who is a well known chef, Thea even has her cookbooks, but Maria's life has been marked by this mystery of her husband, and what REALLY happened to him. Maria is being so secretive about everything and as everything starts to unravel, I just couldn't believe it. The twists kept on coming, and coming, so many secrets being revealed, and right when we thought we knew what was going on, it was NOT what we thought it was, I was unhinged, I couldn't sleep, it was THAT serious.

This book is REALLY good.

Anything for family, am I right??

Thanks Netgalley and the publishers for giving me the opportunity to read this book.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced reader copy

The Dead Husband Cookbook by Danielle Valentine is a first person dual-POV suspense. Thea is an assistant editor at a publishing house with good mentorship and had a bright future ahead of her until her comments about a predatory politician of a memoir she worked on went viral online and the publishing house was sued. When Thea is given a chance to work on TV chef Maria’s memoir, a highly anticipated potential look into the disappearance or murder of her husband. Thea can’t lose this chance, but things are strange in Maria’s home and the rumors over Maria’s husband that have persisted for thirty years might have some truth.

Because a good chunk of the book is Thea staying at Maria’s house as she edits the book, we get some of the first chapters of the memoir as well as recipes that have names related to what was in the chapter. This adds some texture to the context as it shapes what the reader knows about Maria and her husband Damien as well as several other figures, many of whom we meet first in the memoir. Everything else we knew about Maria was coming from conversations around her as a legend in the culinary and TV worlds and the way the public conscious talks about her and her husband.

A major theme is motherhood and being a wife in a marriage that changes after children. Thea herself is married and she has a young daughter and she’s struggling to reconcile the new normal they have with what she wants for her career in publishing, especially given how precarious her career has been lately. Maria’s daughter, Issie, is still living with Maria and has a young daughter herself who Thea gravitates to because she’s roughly the same age as Thea’s own daughter. Slowly, we get the peeled back layers of how motherhood affected Maria’s own feelings towards a lot of things without resenting her children.

I am still figuring out the difference between a thriller, a mystery, and a suspense, but I would put this in the suspense bucket based on what I know of the genre. Yes, there are twists, but the pacing is not what I expect of a thriller. A thriller, for me, would have way more chapters, move at a much faster pace, and will have different beats. The beats here are closer to what I expect of the suspense genre from books like Count My Lies and it moves at a slower, much more character-driven pace.

I would recommend this to fans of books about publishing and celebrity and readers looking for a suspense with a Martha Stewart-esque character

If I were to keep this review brief and straightforward, I would tell you that the ideas Danielle Valentine had for The Dead Husband Cookbook were not only great but also original. Unfortunately, though, the execution was consistently off throughout the book.
However, I received this book as an ARC in exchange for an honest review, and will be diving into why I believe The Dead Husband Cookbook needed a hell of a lot more editing. Which, given the protagonist, is hilarious to me.

Firstly, The Dead Husband Cookbook has A LOT going on. New questions and evidence are consistently introduced, and not one is answered until the last 10% of the book. Leaving you thinking wtf is happening, the other 90% of the book.

The very first issue I had with the book was the timeline of Thea coming back to work after maternity leave and committing "the big oops" of her career.
Here's the facts...
- Thea had done an absolute no-no in the publishing industry, which is talking badly about an author's book (or in this case, memoir) she was editing. She blames this on getting tipsy off one or two glasses of wine because her tolerance is lower due to breastfeeding.
- Thea believes she is getting fired when she receives a text from her boss to come to her office first thing in the morning (this is in the first quarter of the book). We are led to believe that this text and the "big oops" are happening close together on the timeline. Thea's child is being written as a toddler, not an infant, so I am already confused.
- We are told that Thea broke her pelvis during labor. This is the reason we are given that she was on maternity leave for so long. I googled it because I was curious and found that a serious injury to the pelvis can take up to 1 year to recover from. Google isn't a doctor, but it helped me try to get a sense of the timeline Valentine was going for. At this point, I figured her kid was ~1 year old.
When it is revealed in the book that Thea's daughter is, in fact, three, the beginning of the book completely fell apart for me. The beginning of the book sets up the entire foundation of why Thea takes on Maria's memoir in the first place. Without that foundation, the rest of the book loses some purpose.

The Dead Husband Cookbook has a fairly large cast when you think of the setting, which is a secluded farmhouse mansion. Every character is written vaguely as though you should be suspicious of them. This is pretty standard issue for any thriller. However, where most thrillers make up for their lack of character development with an utterly mind-boggling plot, that is where this book missed the mark. I think if the plot had been more distracting, the lack of character development would not stick out to me.

I expected the plot to pack a lot more punch with how much filler was included in it. There are Reddit excerpts and whole chapters of Maria's book. Not to mention the several whole recipes, which were a cute touch. While you got some information from Maria's memoir, I thought there were many more efficient ways to give us that information. The majority of the book is told through Thea's POV. She is slightly an unreliable narrator. I am usually not a fan of narrators with their "own secrets," but I liked her. There are a few Maria chapters sprinkled in that I think could have gone without. I think Thea being able to figure things out without Maria's chapters would have been a more creative route.

From reading the blurb and the first impression of the cover, you assume The Dead Husband Cookbook has some horror elements. While reading, I could tell that horror was attempted, but it mostly fell flat. The ending had some horror vibes, but it didn't make up for the poorly done suspense and horror throughout.

The Dead Husband Cookbook is an extremely slow-burning thriller. You do not find out what happens until the last few chapters, and even then, is it really what happened? While I did love the fact that the ending kept me wondering what the truth really was, I felt very little payoff from it. I will say I did not suspect the big twist at the end. However, it's one of the oldest tricks in the thriller book. With how creative the rest of the plot was, I was disappointed by the reveal. The rest of the ending was interesting, though, and did solve the majority of the confusion I experienced throughout the book. About the only confusing element I had by the end was the maternity leave timeline I spoke on earlier.

The Dead Husband could have been such a cool story, I think, if it just had more editing. There were some clarifications that needed to be made and scenes that could have been cut.

After a mistake, Thea is on the brink of losing her career in publishing, but that all changes after she is hand-selected by Maria, an incredibly famous and beloved cookbook author, to edit her all-revealing memoir after a public life rife with rumors and scandal.

This book was such a fun read! This book leaned into many themes and tied them all up perfectly. I found this thriller to be quite complex, while still juicy and an easy read. I was able to see the biggest of the many twists about halfway through the book, but it still left many questions to be answered at the end. I also adored the cheekily-named recipes throughout the book and think they added a note of levity to a fairly dark and creepy book.

I definitely recommend checking out this book upon release!!

Even though I rated The Dead Husband Cookbook three stars here, I would say it's a solid 3.5 stars. It's not good enough, though, to be rated four stars for a 3.5 star read. Hope that makes sense! Anyway, this is the story of a celebrity chef, Maria Capello, who has finally decided to come clean and write her memoir. The book promises to cover her thirty-year career and will also cover the details of the night that her husband, also a famous chef, went missing. Maria is controlling in her choice of editor, and things are just plain weird in dealing with her.
This book-within-a-book concept is interesting but extremely thin, in my opinion. The chapters from the chef just aren't enough to create a book, and of course that causes issues. Later the book starts to really get into the mystery of the story, and even a bit of horror, i.e., slaughterhouse scenes. I was not satisfied with the resolution. I will say that it was a page-turner, though.

Thanks to NetGalley, the publisher and the author for an advance reader copy in exchange for my honest review.

Many thanks to NetGalley, Soucebooks Landmark and Dreamscape Media for gifting me both a digital and audio ARC of the new book by Danielle Valentine, with the audiobook perfectly narrated by Lauryn Allman. All opinions expressed in this review are my own - 5 stars!

Maria Capello is a celebrity chef, with dozens of cookbooks, a television show, and bestselling pasta sauces. But there's also her history - after her famous chef husband, Damien, disappeared twenty years ago, she stepped into the spotlight and never looked back. Nor has she ever spoken about his disappearance until now. She approaches a small publishing house with her memoir but will only work with editor Thea Woods. Thea, a huge fan of Maria's, has never met the star and doesn't understand why she's being picked to edit this book. But she needs a win after a disastrous mistake that threatens to ruin her career. Will she finally learn whether the rumors are true that Maria killed Damien and about her legend secret ingredient?

After reading and loving Delicate Condition, I couldn't wait to dive into Valentine's latest and I was not disappointed. If you like dark humor and mystery and have a strong stomach, you are going to love this book. Written in a book-in-a-book format, we go back in the past and read Maria's memoir (one chapter at a time) to learn the background, as well as the story of Thea staying in Maria's farmhouse in the present reading the manuscript. And discovering many creepy things both in the present and past. Plus there are wonderful sounding recipes in Maria's manuscript that will make you seriously hungry. I thought the narrator did an exceptional job with all the voices and I was addicted from the beginning. Don't miss this one!

THE DEAD HUSBAND COOKBOOK - Not what I expected, but this turned out to be a good read. Nice surprises along with the predictable. Interesting characters with Interesting story lines made for a a quick read. Source: Netgalley. 4*

Recipes will never look the same after reading. A food guru, Maria and Thea an editor, are working on Maria's memoirs. What is revealed is more than the life of the culinary star. There's murder, intrigue, secret ingredients and a missing husband. A thrilling tale of what really happened and what is really in the sauce!

This was such a good read! Just as Thea was left wanting more I was too! I couldn’t read fast enough to keep up with how badly I wanted to know what was coming next. The addition of recipes throughout the book was a nice unique addition- though I don’t know if I want to try any of Maria’s cooking (iykyk)