"Cucina in Giallo" a Collection of Short Stories: Leo Rota

Cucina in Giallo is a collection of short stories in Italian by various different authors. These short stories are what are known in Italian as “Gialli”, or in English detective stories and they all have the common theme of “Cucina” or cooking. These stories range from a few pages to forty plus pages long, and of course, had varying levels of entertainment. My favorite short story was definitely “Con Cucina” by Alicia Giménez-Bartlett, which tells the story of two sisters, Marta and Berta Miralles and their search for a murderer at their Thai cooking class. The story is on the longer side in the book and is the second story in the collection. The culprit of the crime was at no point really a mystery but the story telling and characters were good, especially for such a short story. 

As someone who loves both short stories and mystery books my expectations were very high for this collection. Sadly, it seems that creating a real sense of mystery is very hard in such short stories and I was left mostly disappointed. One thing that I did notice while reading the various stories is that most often the shorter stories were in reality more mysterious and entertaining. These stories were less full on stories with characters and plot, and more abstract ideas of mystery. Without having to worry about characters and actual plot – which in most cases just seemed too simple and underdeveloped in the longer stories – the shorter stories could focus solely on creating mystery and did not even necessarily need to have a grand reveal at the end. Sadly, even these were not close to the best short stories I have read and this book, while still being interesting and not too boring to read, disappointed me.