The Red, the Fed and the Dead

by Tess Rafferty

“Marriage can be the death of you…”So thinks Kat Kelly when she agrees to her husband Mike’s plan to return to Italy during the rainy season. Fortunately, they have plenty of red wine to take the chill off. After two days in the damp city of Bologna, known for its food, its university and its communist tendencies—a.k.a.“The red, the fed & the learned” —the couple meet up with friends Sunny and Nino at a Medieval castle in the Emilia-Romagna countryside. There they discover the acetaias that produce the thirty-year-old extra Vecchio balsamic vinegar; the dairies that make the world-famous Parmesan Reggiano; and, of course, more than one dead body.So once again, Kat and Sunny go hunting for clues while also hunting for truffles, with an international cast of suspects that includes a Ghanaian-Italian professor; a Canadian food consultant with mysterious ties to the castle; an American tech millionaire-turned-winemaker; and two feuding Michelin-starred chefs who just happen to be brothers. Kat’s insatiable appetite for both food and answers leads her to uncover an old mystery that travels all the way back to the German occupation and the American Buffalo soldiers who liberated Italy, and to the economic boom and pop music explosion of the fifties and sixties.

333 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 1, 2021

About the author

Most recently, Tess wrote Halfway House, an original half hour pilot at Warner Brothers TV. She has written for numerous television shows, including Martha and Snoop’s Potluck Party Challenge, @Midnight, The Comedy Central Roast of Roseanne and she spent over 7 years on The Soup, as both a writer and a supervising producer. As an author, Tess made her debut with her memoir Recipes for Disaster. Under the Tuscan Gun is her first novel.

The creator of 2017’s Take Back the Workplace March Against Sexual Harassment, Tess is a featured blogger for Dame and Ms. Magazine and also writes the cooking/political blog, Recipes for Resistance. Her essay, “The Revolution Will Be Catered” was featured in Rage Baking: A Collection of Recipes and Conversations for Our Time (Simon & Schuster.)

Tess’s video Aftermath, shot in the days following the 2016 election has received over 50 million hits on Occupy Democrats.

Reviews

[Joanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tess Rafferty has done it again. I received an advance copy, and loved every minute of reading this cozy, fun whodunit set in rainy, cold Bologna. I feel the same way about the Kat Kelly series as Kat Kelly feels about Italy: I can’t get enough. The Red, The Fed and the Dead serves up the same deliciously engaging mystery as her previous books, and I love how the Kat Kelly mysteries manage to not only be funny and surprising, but weave in Italian history as well.

This is the perfect book to curl up with in the winter months next to a fire with a glass of red wine or a hot toddy. It's a wonderful escape without leaving your couch. If you love a good mystery and have a fondness for Italian food and culture, you’ll enjoy the hell out of this book.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

So fun to read a book after I've met the author