Simona Griffo Mystery Books in Order

The Simona Griffo books start with The Trouble with a Small Raise, and the premise tells you a lot about the series. Simona is a recent Italian immigrant in Manhattan, working in an advertising agency and trying to build a new life. She goes in ready to ask her boss for a raise and finds him dead instead. From that point on, trouble has a way of finding her, even when she is only trying to do her job, go on vacation, or visit family.

Simona is an amateur sleuth, but not a cool, detached one. She is curious, impulsive, funny, homesick, and very good at noticing what people are not saying. Food matters to her. So does language. She carries Italy with her in her cooking, her sayings, and the way she reads a room. That gives the series a lively immigrant viewpoint. New York is exciting, hard, generous, sharp-edged, and always being compared, openly or quietly, with Rome.

The setting shifts from book to book, but the social worlds stay wonderfully specific. The Trouble with Moonlighting moves through the chaos of an Italian film crew in New York. The Trouble with Too Much Sun sends Simona to a resort in Guadeloupe. The Trouble with Thin Ice traps her inside a tense family weekend in Connecticut. The Trouble with Going Home takes her back to Rome, where family history and murder collide. Later books dive into the garment trade and the Hamptons in The Trouble with a Bad Fit and The Trouble with a Hot Summer.

There is an ongoing personal thread, too. Stanley Greenhouse, the homicide detective in Simona's life, knows she has a habit of sticking her nose where it may not belong, and he does not always love it. Later, the Russian cabdriver Dmitri K. becomes a useful partner when Simona wants help on a case. Those relationships give the books a nice push and pull. Simona is independent, but she is not alone.

These are city mysteries with garlic on the stove.

The tone is lighter than in Trinchieri's darker standalone fiction, but the books are not fluffy. The murders grow out of ambition, money, family pain, betrayal, and old resentments. What keeps them buoyant is Simona's voice and the pleasure Trinchieri clearly takes in place, work, and daily life. Advertising offices, film sets, fashion showrooms, restaurants, apartments, and vacation spots all feel lived in.

If you start this series, expect brisk mysteries with a lot of personality. You get a smart lead, plenty of food, and a heroine who is always negotiating between old-country instincts and new-city realities. At heart, these books are about making a home in a place that can thrill you one minute and overwhelm you the next. Simona keeps going anyway, which is a big part of her charm.