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)

I received an ARC from NetGalley. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

In this book we follow Thea, a struggling editor, as she navigates a new opportunity to renew her career and her reputation. As a woman struggling to navigate life as a mother, daughter, and wife, she will ultimately do anything for her family. Do you see what I did there? ;)

This book has some interesting twists and turns, taking the reader on a winding journey with an unreliable (in my opinion) narrator. It's important to pay attention to all the details this book offers because they are important to understanding and rationalizing each characters' actions.

My only gripe with this book is with our main girl, Thea.

**This next part may be a bit of a spoiler, so scroll farther down if you don't want to know anything!**

But Thea, girl. What the hell are you doing ignoring every damn alarm bell that could ever go off?! And what are we doing drinking potions from a stranger?! Come on now...

Ultimately, I enjoyed reading this book and would absolutely recommend it to a friend looking for a mystery / thriller.

First, thank you, Netgalley, for this ARC copy in exchange for my honest thoughts.

Pub Date: August 5.2025

This book was such a fun read.  It was definitely a captivating thriller that caught my attention from the beginning. The pacing was perfect. Even with the "book within a book."

We follow Thea Woods, an editor who is on the verge of losing her job and is given one final chance of keeping it.

Then there's Maria, a celebrity chef who has lived with secrets & lies for 30 years. There's plenty of rumors and gossip.. but what parts of it are true?

Will Thea find out the truth when she becomes Maria's editor for her up and coming Memoir or will that be a lie too?

Loved the recipes that were included in this book, warning they will make you hungry 😋

The buildup in this book was incredible. I really liked the touch of having recipes after each chapter. I kept expecting to find sinister ingredients and I loved it

When I tell you this book had its claws in me- I felt like a mouse that just got swooped up for hawk-dinner. I couldn’t and didn’t put it down. Finished it in less than 4 hours and I LOVED it.

So, we have Thea, an editor who is about to lose her position over a scandal. She gets called into her boss’ office and she just knows she’s about to get fired, but instead lands a high profile memoir by a woman she’s idolized her entire life- the catch? She’s accused of killing her husband and making meatballs out of him! Thea needs her to tell the story of his disappearance in the memoir to keep her job, get promoted, and get a raise she so desperately needs- so when she agrees to some crazy terms and stays at the author’s home, crazy things start happening.

The twist was *chefs kiss* so well done. I loved every second of this book. You definitely need to read this one if you love a good thriller (maybe slightly horror?)

Thank you to NetGalley and SourceBooks Landmark for the privilege of reading this ARC in exchange for an honest review

Disgraced book editor Thea’s career is crumbling, her reputation’s in shambles, and she's just waiting for her boss to fire her. So when she is unexpectedly tapped to edit the memoir of celebrity chef Maria Capello — the very woman who practically raised her through her TV show and dog-eared cookbooks — she can hardly believe her luck. Maria’s husband may have disappeared under extremely suspicious circumstances, but Thea has never believed the conspiracy theories that painted Maria as a murderess. This is Thea's shot at redemption... and a chance to finally step into Maria’s world.

But Maria’s private farm in upstate New York isn’t just remote — it’s practically a gothic manor — and Thea quickly feels more like a prisoner than a guest. With her phone confiscated, the Wi-Fi disabled, and Maria’s carefully curated memoir beginning to crack under scrutiny, Thea starts to suspect that Maria’s famous recipes might come with some unsavory secrets. Especially when it becomes clear that Damien Capello wasn’t the only one who’s gone missing over the years.

I expected a mystery — and The Dead Husband Cookbook absolutely delivers on twisty secrets, dysfunctional families, and messy power dynamics — but what delighted me most was the creeping, uncanny atmosphere of a full-blown domestic gothic. There’s something delightfully rotten under all the coastal-grandmother aesthetic, and the pacing keeps you just disoriented enough to feel Thea’s growing dread. If the marketing had leaned harder into the gothic angle, I would have (ahem) devoured this even sooner.

This one’s for thriller readers who like their stories rich with family secrets, garnished with cannibal rumors, and simmering with gothic dread.

I fell in love with the title and cover of this book, and I knew I just had to read it. The Dead Husband Cookbook follows editor Thea Woods, who has been down on her luck career-wise after a scandal with a book she had previously edited. Thea receives a call that celebrity chef Maria Capello is writing a memoir, but her only requirement is that Thea is her editor. Thea drops everything to head to Maria's farmhouse to begin reading the book--Maria is notoriously secretive about her personal life, and will only allow Thea to read the book one chapter at a time at Maria's house. Will Thea finally find out what happened that night all those years ago, when Maria's husband mysteriously vanished?

This was such a fun read. It's dark and twisty. I loved the spooky farmhouse setting, and I loved the cast of characters. You aren't sure who you can trust the whole time you're reading. This is a mixed-media type of book, and the mystery of what happened to Maria's husband is revealed slowly through Thea's perspective and excerpts from Maria's memoir. There were some really great twists that I didn't see coming, and what really made this book unique was the inclusion of actual recipes throughout the book. I thought that was such a fun addition to the story.

A really excellent thriller - I loved the setup of a famous chef & the editor chosen to work on her memoir because it combines two of my favorite things: food and editing. (This book made me SO hungry.)

This becomes very tense very quickly and keeps it up throughout the whole book. Despite being a bit predictable, I enjoyed seeing how everything played out and watching Thea pick apart the mystery bit by bit.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC!

What is famous chef Maria Capello's secret ingredient?

Danielle Valentine's book The Dead Husband Cookbook is a dark thriller about famous chef Maria Capello, who is known for her meatballs and missing husband. Maria has finally decided after 30 years to write her version of events as to what happened to her husband many years ago. With the help of editor Thea Woods we find out just that and even more!

I really enjoyed this book and give it 4.5 stars! This fun little mystery was fast paced and had me not wanting to put it down. I enjoyed every aspect of this book even down to the different points of view of Maria and Thea. It kept it fun and twisty! If you love a good murder mystery this one is for you!

Thank you Sourcebooks Landmark for providing me with an eARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own and reviews will be posted on Goodreads and Fable on July 30, 2025.

I’m not a fan of cooking or cookbooks, but this book was weird in a good way, and weird I can work with. A lot of family drama, manipulative machinations, possible cannibalism, and murder. This book has a lot going on, and while at times the story seemed to drag, the last third of the book made the wait worth it.

Thanks to NetGalley and Sourcebooks Landmark for the opportunity to read this ARC!