Miracolo Northern Italian restaurant has been in the family for four generations. The popular Philadelphia area eatery is currently owned by seventy-six-year old Maria Pia Angelotta. A running disagreement with her head chef, and granddaughter, Eve Angelotta, to place cannoli on the menu keep the two strong-willed women at odds.

When Maria Pia’s gentlemen friend is found dead in the kitchen of the restaurant, police arrest the elderly owner and take her to jail. Eva sets aside her frustration with her “nonna” and hires Joe Beck, a local attorney, to help apprehend the real killer.

Eve enlists the help of her whole restaurant family and a few additional friends as she works double time to keep the restaurant open while also working to get her grandmother out of the brig.

She also immediately added a cannoli recipe to the menu that turned out to be much more popular than she expected. Eve worked hard to free her grandmother, find the real killer, keep nonna from finding out about her successful cannoli desert, and manage two possible male companions.

You Cannoli Die Once by Shelley Costa is the first book in a new mystery series based on the fictional Philadelphia eatery. Costa is best known for her popular short fiction stories and also teaches fiction writing and screenwriting at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, Ohio.

Costa uses plenty of humor, especially by her heroine, to keep the pace moving as her characters, and readers, work through the numerous clues to find the killer before anyone else loses their life.

While it’s sometimes a bit difficult to keep her many characters straight at times, she has created strong, unique personalities who keep the story moving swiftly and provides occasional laugh out loud moments.

Hopefully in the next book the author will weed out the unnecessary characters that sometimes cluttered the scenes, while keeping the main family members, friends, and co-workers that we were growing to like. The ending was fairly quick, exciting, and surprising, at least to me.

As with most food related cozy mysteries the author provided us with a recipe featured in the controversy between Eve and her nonna. The name of the recipe, Rebel Cannoli, basically says it all as you will see when you read this delicious tale.

A special thank you goes to Simon and Schuster for providing us with a complimentary copy of You Cannoli Die Once for our review. You can find Shelley Costa’s mysteries at Amazon.com.