July 1, 2023
Lila Macapagal should have enough on her hands with her partnership in the Brew-ha Cafe. But her extended Filipino American family often demands her help. This time, her godmothers April, Mae, and June, the Calendar Crew, are opening a new laundromat next door to June's dry-cleaning service. It's scheduled to open the day of the town's big spring clean. While Lila and her aunties are at a morning chamber of commerce meeting, someone smashes up the laundromat and graffities it with "Mind Your Business." The Calendar Crew has certainly stirred up trouble with their gossip, but who would go to the lengths of vandalizing their new business? April's visiting niece is put to work at the laundromat, but the aunties also ask her to do some spying. When someone ends up dead and another family member lands in the hospital, the family turns to Lila and a former police detective to investigate. VERDICT The sequel to Blackmail and Bibingka celebrates various food cultures in a mystery that emphasizes the importance of family, anti-bullying, and the search for justice for victims of crime.--Lesa Holstine
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August 1, 2023
A pair of new arrivals spell trouble for the indefatigable Filipina foodies of Shady Grove, Illinois. The first arrival is homegrown: the laundromat Lila Macapagal's godmothers--Ninang April, Ninang Mae, and Ninang June--are about to open next door to the dry cleaner Ninang June inherited from her late husband. Ultima Bolisay, whose family owns the town's only laundromat, isn't happy about the opening, and neither is whoever decorates the Calendar Crew's establishment with spray-painted injunctions to "MIND YOUR BUSINESS." (Wonder if these could be the same person.) The other arrival has come from halfway around the world: Ninang April's niece Divina de los Santos, an art school graduate who's visiting from the Philippines because she wants to keep up with her relatives, or check out her career prospects, or flirt with the locals, or put some distance between herself and something that happened back home. Almost from the get-go, Lila thinks there's something off about Divina, but the bad buzz isn't nearly enough to explain why the visitor is killed one night inside the new laundromat. Afraid that they'll never be able to open the place, Lila's godmothers want her to investigate, and when Jonathan Park, the retired police detective whose brother, dentist Jae Park, is Lila's boyfriend, agrees to work his contacts to help her, she agrees. The mystery, as in Lila's first three cases, is so consistently upstaged by the frenzy of delectable dishes lovingly prepared and consumed at Tita Rosie's Kitchen, which Lila's grandmother owns, and the neighboring Brew-ha Cafe run by Lila and her friends Elena Torres and Adeena Awan, that readers will be doubly surprised at the surprise unmasking. Sorry, other food cozies. You can't hold a candle to this mouthwatering franchise.
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