A closed restaurant. A dead wine merchant. And a pattern nobody wants him to see.

When chef Matteo Bellini arrives in Krakw with nothing but his father’s knives and a dream of opening an honest Italian kitchen, he finds the restaurant he’d hoped to join already shutteredlocked by a landlord with cold eyes and colder paperwork.

Ania Zieliska, a burned-out former investigative journalist, recognizes the pattern immediately: inspections that appear too fast, notices too vague, silence too convenient. She’s seen this kind of quiet erasure before, and she swore she’d never watch it happen twice without saying something.

Together with a sharp-tongued caf owner and a waiter who fancies himself a detective, Matteo and Ania start pulling threads that lead from Kazimierz’s cobbled streets to a foundation with friends in very high placesand a body count that starts the moment they get too close to the truth.

In a city where old grudges simmer next to new money, two outsiders will have to decide how much truth is worth the risk of losing everything all over again.

Murder la Polonaise – is Book 1 in the Bellini-Zieliska Mysteries a series where food, culture, and murder share the same table.