Séance and Sensibility

In Acorn Hollow this Valentine's Day, love is in the air, snow is on the ground, and chocolate-and murder-are on the menu.... When Acorn Hollow's fiercest Italian matriarch and most famous crime reporter, Rita Calabrese, is asked to serve as chair of the chocolate festival, she fires up the ovens, cranks up the chocolate fountains-and even begrudgingly agrees to a date auction hosted by her newspaper's cranky male advice columnist. But Rita's sweet February soon takes a bitter turn when her daughter Gina ditches her high-powered finance job and perfect Italian boyfriend to restore a crumbling Gilded Age mansion-sending Rita's dreams of ever becoming a nonna up in smoke. To make matters worse, the construction crew is headed by none other than Gina's razor-tongued nemesis, Beau. As Gina and Beau polish the woodwork in the library and tame the thicket of poisonous plants in the conservatory, their sparring reaches a fever pitch. Then they unearth a body in a bricked-up secret passage-and hand Rita a front-page story that gets the whole town buzzing. But when a séance intended to summon the truth ends in yet another murder, Rita finds herself with two murders to solve and a trail of clues that stretch from Stockholm to a clandestine Brooklyn voodoo temple. Can she solve the murders in time for the chocolate festival...and finally manage to find her daughter a nice Italian boy? Includes mouth-watering recipes for Italian-inspired chocolate desserts!