Book Recommendation: Homicide and Halo-Halo | Mia P Manansala | Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mystery #2

This is part two of my coverage of the Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mysteries, which I am re-reading In anticipation of the upcoming fourth book by Mia P. Manansala, Murder and Mamon. I read these on my own and I realized that the comfort they brought me during the pandemic meant they fell during the time I wasn’t really posting or even writing reviews. I’ve been loving reading them again and getting to put my thoughts together! While I strongly recommend reading them as the series, each book can definitely be read and enjoyed as a standalone.

In this entry, I share my thoughts about Homicide and Halo-Halo, which is the second book in the Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mystery Series (go back and check out my review of Arsenic and Adobo). I’ll talk more about this in the review section, but I found it compelling that this book addressed the events of the prior book and how they may have impacted Lila.

In Homicide and Halo-Halo, Lila Macapagal is pulled back towards her prior expereinece with a local beauty pageant when her judging leads her to encounter another dead body and a mystery to solve.

About the Book | Homicide and Halo-Halo

I present both the plot and a character list. If you don’t need either, feel free to scroll forward to my spoiler-free review below! But I like to include these for myself and readers like me who may come back to this book in the future and need a refresher on who’s who and what happened.

Plot and Setting

The Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mystery series is set in Shady Palms, IL, a smallish town with a very diverse set of residents, restaurants, and businesses. Homicide and Halo-Halo is set in summer, just a few months after the events of Arsenic and Adobo. Lila is still caught between two love interests, local dentist Dr. Jae and Adeena’s brother Amir, though she doesn’t feel up to a relationship after everything that happened.

Lila and her best friend Adeena are working to open the Brew-ha Café with Adeena’s new girlfriend Elena. Adeena brings her barista expertise, Elena uses her Mexican background with plants, herbs, and healing to develop homemade beauty and wellness items. And Lila should be helping with the baked goods and sweet treats. If only her brain wasn’t completely blocked from creative ideas in the wake of the traumatic events a few months prior…

But Lila has more than baked goods on her mind, as she’s been strongly requested to judge the Miss Teen Shady Palms beauty pageant that she herself won as a teenager. The pageant helped her pay to move to Chicago after graduating, but carries with it unpleasant memories of her late mother who was a former beauty queen herself and kept Lila enrolled in pageants.

Despite her reluctance to join the pageant judges, Lila is pleased with some of the changes made to make the pageant more progressive and supportive of young women outside of their looks. But when the head judge, Rob Thompson, is found murdered and her cousin Bernadette is the main suspect, Lila realizes she needs to put her sleuthing cap back on and solve another mystery, before someone else winds up dead!

Characters

Cozy mystery series are partly so amazing due to the cast of characters that we get to revisit and add to each time a new mystery comes out. Starting with Arsenic and Adobo, I’m keeping a running list of the characters in this series to help as a reference when I get to each new book.

Lila Macapagal is the main character and narrator of the books. She is Filipino, helps at her family restaurant, is opening a new café, and is guest judging the local beauty pageant, Miss Teen Shady Palms. Cecelia was her mother who has now passed away. Tita Rosie is Lila’s aunt and owns Tita Rosie’s Kitchen. Lola Flor is her grandmother (her late father’s mother).

Adeena Awan is Lila’s best friend and co-owner of the Brew-ha Café. Elena Torres is the third owner and Adeena’s girlfriend, after leaving her waitressing job at her family restaurant El Gato Negro. Diana is Elena’s mother. Amir is Adeena’s brother and an attorney. He has also expressed interest in Lila.

Detective Jonathan Park is the detective assigned primarily to the murder investigation. He has a bit of a sweet spot for Tita Rosie. Dr. Jae Park is his brother and a local dentist who shows interest in dating Lila, though she isn’t ready to date when the book opens. Millie works at Dr. Jae’s dental office. Officer Clarkson works on the police force and his daughter Abigail is competing in the pageant.

The “Calendar Crew” consists of April, Mae, and June—a group of non-blood-related godmothers (Ninang) who act as aunties in Lila’s life and hang out with her Tita Rosie at Tita Rosie’s Kitchen. Marcus is Ninang Mae’s son and a former local corrections officer. Bernadette is Ninang June’s daughter and Lila’s cousin (not blood related). She has an ongoing rivalry with Lila.

Joy Munroe is the sister of Bernadette’s friend from college and is waitressing at Tita Rosie’s Kitchen. Joy is also a contestant in the beauty pageant being coached by Bernadette. Joy’s friend Katie Pang is competing as well. Her mother is Winnie and owns the Honeybee Salon.

Terrence Howell is a close friend of Lila and Adeena’s and a freelance graphic designer. He is engaged to Janet Spinelli, a former high school rival of Lila’s and administrator at the local hospital. Wilson Philipps is the head reporter from the Shady Palms News.

The Thompson family is one of the oldest and most prestigious families in Shady Palms. Rob Thompson is has taken over as head of the family businesses and is a pageant judge. Rob’s death kicks off the mystery in this book. Beth Thompson is his wife. Valerie Thompson is his sister and on the pageant committee. Sana Williams runs a fitness studio and is a pageant judge.

William Acevedo is the head of the Chamber of Commerce. Bill Gunderson is the mayor of Shady Palms and a big advocate of the pageant. Mary Ann Randall is the head of the PTA and former winner of the pageant. Her daughter Sharon is competing. Leslie is Sharon’s best friend and is also competing.

George and Nettie Bishop own Big Bishop’s BBQ. Stan and Martha Kosta are the owners of Stan’s Diner. Akio and Yuki Sato own Sushi-ya. Their daughter Naoko is in the pageant. Mike Krasinkski owns the Pierogi Palace. Oskar Weinman owns the One Stop Shop, a deli and grocery store. Rob Thompson had an affair with his wife and caused their divorce.

Review | Homicide and Halo-Halo

Tone and Context

In the author’s note to open this, Manansala notes that both she and Lila were going through a darker time when this book was written. For Manansala (like many of us) that meant the mental health and social implications of the global pandemic. I myself shared that I could barely post reviews during that time, and I’ve lost track of the many great books that helped me escape when many of us felt so trapped and unsure of the future.

For the protagonist of the series, Lila—she is dealing with the fallout from book one and the mental health struggles associated with what she and her loved ones went through. I brought up the evolution of cozy mysteries in my post on Cozy Mystery 101 and this book is a perfect example of how we are seeing the genre start to explore some real topics, while still keeping the overall tone and format lighter and less graphic.

I found Homicide and Halo-Halo resonated with me in a different way than the previous book. It doesn’t mean I liked it better or worse, but I appreciated it as a follow up to Lila’s story and I enjoyed the author’s note to open the book and place it in context. The mystery is interesting but this book is much more focused on Lila as a character and where she is after the last book. As I said, it can be read and enjoyed as a standalone but reading it back to back with Arsenic and Adobo really added an extra layer of engagement for me.

Themes | Mental Health

“Asians do not go to therapy. We don’t even acknowledge that mental health issues exist. It’s considered a sign of weakness, that we couldn’t work things out for ourselves. And a sign of shame, that we even needed help in the first place.”

For Lila, the central theme of this book is hearing the many people in her life champion that it’s ok to struggle with mental health. This starts with Detective Park, who has referred her to a therapist after the last case took a dark turn. It is reinforced through other friendships in the book, including Adeena and Elena who have both struggled with their own counseling needs as they chose life paths that may have differed from what their parents wanted. We even see it with Sana through her coaching experience and talking with Lila about how seeking mental health treatment can be stigmatized in many cultures.

Themes | Family

In the first book, Lila’s mother and her parents in general weren’t a central focus. We knew they had passed away, we knew that her decision to leave Shady Palms and her reluctance to return were in part tied to that, but I don’t even know that we got them identified by name (we still don’t with her father). Unless I missed it, we also didn’t get the relationship to her family she lives with now. I had assumed Lola Flor was her mother’s mother, but we learn she was her father’s mother.

In Homicide and Halo-Halo, Lila’s mother is a figure who can’t be avoided for many reasons, but the beauty pageant is one of the main ones. We learn that she was a beauty queen in the Philippines and that the money she made from that pageant helped her move to the United States. She reconnected with Lila’s father and they married. She continued to send money home to help her family until her death. In her eyes, Lola Flor never respected her fully as anyone other than a pageant queen. She couldn’t cook the way the other women in the family could. But she tried, though it didn’t always resonate.

“She’s been gone so long that I sometimes forgot what she looked like. The sound of her voice. The feel of her hand stroking my hair. The warmth of her smile when I won another competition. Yet all the memories I didn’t want to keep stayed, jagged pieces lodged in my brain and heart. […] Her desire to mold me into whoever she thought she should’ve been—and my yearning yet constant failure to be the girl she wanted me to be.”

Lila talks a lot about both the things she loved about her mother and the painful things that made her feel not good enough. With Lila being pushed into beauty pageants from a young age, it was clear she felt her mother wanted her to fit a certain mold that she didn’t always identify with. But as we learn more about Cecelia and how her family encouraging her to do the pageant allowed her to have the money to move to America and provide for them, it’s easy to see that she may have wanted the same for Lila. That Lila acknowledges the pageant gave her the money to move to Chicago and pursue a culinary career isn’t lost in the book or on Lila. But her memories of her mother are complicated and messy.

At one point her Tita Rosie brings her a recipe for her mother’s special chicken that she found. This recipe was one of the purest ways Lila’s mother showed love. It was the only recipe she created, kept close to herself, and made for Lila every day after school. Lila has mentioned before that food is love in Filipino culture, and her memories of this chicken are clearly integrated as a way to remind her of her mother’s love, not just of her perceived failings. Of course, her mother didn’t leave her Tita Rosie the exact recipe—she left a few things out. Lila trying to reinvent the chicken marinade helps bring her back to life in her creativity and love of flavors and cooking.

“My mother has loved in the way that she knew how. I had never felt like enough. But maybe I needed to either let people love me in the limited way they could or learn to ask for what I needed out of a relationship. And if they couldn’t provide it…maybe I needed to learn to move on.”

The Mystery

I spent so long on the themes that I didn’t even get to the mystery! Don’t take the proportion of my review allocated to each as a reflection of the proportion of the story dedicated to each. The mystery is still prominent, and I think that Manansala did a great job putting in the tidbits of Lila’s mental health, growth, and learning throughout.

The mystery revolves around—in classic cozy mystery fashion—the death of a character who we won’t go so far as to say “deserved it”, but who we certainly aren’t shedding too many tears over. While Lila’s cousin (and rival) Bernadette is the main suspect, let’s just say that Rob Thompson gave a lot of people in Shady Palms a reason to want him dead. This man was not the upstanding business man he tried to project. Sure, he invested the money in the pageant to support the winner in her future life endeavors, but he also leered creepily at the contestants (who are underage) on more than one occasion (not to mention Lila).

Meanwhile the list of characters with motives was long. Very long. If you couldn’t tell by my list of characters in the section about this book, many of whom are suspects themselves. I didn’t even go into all of the motives because seeing Lila and her friends and family uncover those is part of the fun. But let’s just say that Rob Thompson isn’t a huge loss to the community of Shady Pines all things considered.

But of course, in addition to Bernadette, there’s his sister who will inherit the family business now after being scorned for being a woman, there’s his wife who he flagrantly cheated on, and there’s the countless people who are deeply impacted by his shady business dealings and personal dalliances. Bernadette herself isn’t the most sympathetic character at times, but it’s clear she is family for Lila, even if not by blood.

Other Happenings

Aside from the mystery, I also loved seeing the progress on the Brew-ha Café. Adeena is an underused character in my opinion—though I loved seeing her in a relationship with Elena, who was only a very minor character in the last novel. This felt organic and I was thrilled when the book opened with the three in business together. Lila’s issues with her creativity block are holding the opening up, and it becomes clear they are heavily linked to her trauma. Seeing them open back up as she processes her feelings surrounding her mother was beautiful.

There is also a bit of a romance! We (and by “we” I mean “I”) didn’t forget about the love triangle that was just beginning to brew (ha) in the first book. On the one hand, we have smart, logical, teen crush Amir—Adeena’s older brother and an attorney who not only fancies Lila, but protects her and her family during the investigations. On the other hand, we have the new hottie in town Dr. Jae who is not only intimately familiar with Lila’s mouth after a biscotti-incident-gone-wrong in book one, he is also thoughtful, caring, and shares the same dairy sensitivity as her. A match made in heaven!

Fittingly, Lila isn’t ready for a relationship. But let’s just say that may or may not be the case by the end of the book and after all of that healing she does. But who will pull ahead?? I can’t spoil it for you!

As always, the food is delectable and an ever-present mouth-watering theme throughout the story. I love reading about the food and I enjoy the recipes at the end for the different treats. Having never had Halo-Halo, I did need to look that up since it’s the titular food and boy is it stunning and delicious-looking!

An absolute delight—I do think this book is best read as a follow up to Arsenic and Adobo, but I think you could enjoy it on its own too. When you are ready, check out my review of book three, Blackmail and Bibingka!

About the Author | Mia P Manansala

Mia P. Manansala (MAH-nahn-sah-lah) (she/her) is a writer and book coach from Chicago who loves books, baking, and bad-ass women. She uses humor (and murder) to explore aspects of the Filipino diaspora, queerness, and her millennial love for pop culture.

She is the winner of the 2022 Anthony Award for Best First Novel, 2022 Macavity Award for Best First Novel, 2022 RUSA Reading List for Mystery, 2021 Agatha Award for Best First Novel, 2018 Hugh Holton Award, the 2018 Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award, the 2017 William F. Deeck – Malice Domestic Grant for Unpublished Writers, and the 2016 Mystery Writers of America/Helen McCloy Scholarship. She was shortlisted for the 2021 Goodreads Choice Award for Mystery/Thriller and the 2021 CHIRBy Award for Fiction by the Chicago Review of Books. She’s also a 2017 Pitch Wars alum and 2018-2020 mentor.

A lover of all things geeky, Mia spends her days procrastibaking, playing JRPGs and dating sims, reading cozy mysteries and diverse romance, and cuddling her dogs Gumiho and Max Power.

Visit Mia’s author page to sign up for her newsletter, learn more about her books, get recipes, and see any upcoming events (I’m stalking it to find out if she will have a local book launch in Chicago for Murder and Mamon!).