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	Catherine Chant is a writer from New England as well the FMAM webmaster. She is a PRO member of the Romance Writers of America (RWA) and an active member of the From the Heart Romance Writers (FTHRW) chapter and the National Association of Women Writers (NAWW). A graduate of Boston College, she worked for fifteen years at her alma mater as a computing & communications consultant/technical writer and web content manager. She is currently working on her first novel. She can be reached at webmaster@fmam.biz.

PASTA IMPERFECT
Maddy Hunter
Pocket Books, August 2004, $6.50, 285pp.
ISBN 0-7434-8291-3

Murder, mayhem and marinara make for a delightfully funny combination. PASTA IMPERFECT, the third book in Maddy Hunter's "A Passport to Peril" mystery series, follows tour escort Emily Andrew as she attempts to lead a group of wacky Iowans on a two-week tour of Italy. One would think sightseeing from Rome to Florence to Pisa is a great job, but as Emily laments in the opening pages, "It's a dream job that suffers only one major drawback. People keep dying on me." And she's not kidding. As the two previous books in the series (ALPINE FOR YOU and TOP O' THE MOURNIN') show, Emily's tours often include a body count.


Emily thinks she's gotten a great deal for her group by accepting discounted slots in the Passion and Pasta tour, sponsored by Hightower Books, where aspiring romance writers can network with agents, editors and other publishing bigwigs. However, trouble besets the tour from the start when their hotel in Rome burns down. Everyone loses their belongings except Emily whose luggage was lost at the airport and turns up just in time for the desperate members of the tour to plunder it. When people start turning up dead in Emily's designer threads, she ponders the disturbing pattern in her tours.


To make up for the bad start to the trip, Hightower Books announces a contest for the best romance book proposal. The winner will receive a $10,000 publishing contract. When two of the three judges in the contest turn up dead or missing, leaving Emily's mother as the one remaining judge, Emily thinks one of the contestants may be playing by a different set of rules and fears for her mother's safety.


While pining for the affections of her distant lover Etienne, a Swiss inspector with short-term amnesia who can't remember he proposed marriage in the previous book, and fighting off the attention of sexy tour guide Duncan Lazarus, Emily stumbles upon clues, jumps to hilarious conclusions at each turn and eventually solves the mystery in a showdown with the killer that is as clever as it is funny.


Told in an engagingly witty first person voice, PASTA IMPERFECT is peppered with hilarious stand-out characters such as Emily's overly helpful mother who offers the contents of Emily's suitcase to the entire tour, her overly amorous Nana who spends the entire tour trying to find ways act out scenes from a romance novel with boyfriend George, and her overly everything transsexual ex-husband Jackie Thumb (this reviewer's favorite character). Other memorable Iowans on the tour include a woman who lost her eyebrows in a freak accident with a gas grill and resorts to things like blue ballpoint pen to draw them back in, and a set of identical twins, one of whom always speaks in rhyme after having spent a lifetime writing greeting card verse.


In the romance writers group you have the barracuda literary agent, the snobby editor who'd rather be doing literary novels, the dueling romance divas who hilariously try to one-up each other on subjects such as who's paid more and if a hero's manhood actually "throbs," and the wannabe writers who specialize in winning first chapter contests, but never finish their manuscripts.


Previously published in historical romance, the author pokes good natured fun at the romance genre throughout the book, from stereotypical "Cowboy" and "Barbarian" romance novels to Amazon.com book reviews. If you're a romance writer, you're sure to find the publishing in-jokes some of the funniest in the whole book.


PASTA IMPERFECT is a delight. It's laugh-out-loud funny, one zany moment to the next. There is a chuckle on every page. And it's completely unpredictable, filled with red herrings and subtle clues that will keep you guessing until the very end. The antics of the cast will thrill you as much as finding out who done it.


Catherine Chant

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