The Dead Husband Cookbook by Danielle Valentine
Sourcebooks Landmark (August 2025)
Reviewed by Haley Newlin
The Dead Husband Cookbook by Danielle Valentine is a worthy follow-up to the author’s motherhood-horror and debut novel, Delicate Condition. Delicate Condition inspired season twelve of Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story: Delicate, starring Emma Roberts and Kim Kardashian.
The Dead Husband Cookbook is another exploration of the daily horror of the female experience. However, it’s less body horror than you might expect. It’s a gritty mystery, each reveal more twisted than the last. I had a really tough time putting this one down.
Maria Capello is a celebrity chef with a mysterious aura. On television, she’s bubbly, warm…motherly, even. In fact, her own children run around the set while she cooks. Her recipes are legendary, but so is the disappearance of her husband twenty years ago. After years of reclusivity and the outlandish accusations that she cooked her husband, Maria seeks a publisher for her memoir.
Thea, a lifelong fan of Maria’s, might make for the perfect editor. The infamous chef invites Thea to the remote farm she once shared with her husband to work on the manuscript. It’s a strange request, but the publisher obliges. However, what Thea didn’t plan on was no internet, no cell service, and that Maria would only allow Thea to read one chapter at a time.
As she does in Delicate Condition, Valentine hooks readers from the first page of The Dead Husband Cookbook. I read the first eighty pages in one sitting. I had to get to Maria’s farm! But what really did it for me was the horrific yet incredible metaphors and commentary on motherhood. The author exposes the barbarity of labor and how women are so objectified, seen, and, first and foremost, as incubators for children. There’s a particularly memorable instance of this featuring a child’s bloody drawing of a pig, but I won’t spoil that for you.
The scenes of butchery are shocking and stomach-churning. What makes these so powerful is how they help readers understand some of the cruelest aspects of humanity, particularly a human’s ability to objectify living things. Once a person can see a living thing for slaughter, whether it be a pig or a fellow human, killing is easy.
Thea’s character was interesting. Her early attachment to Maria Capello from the television show added this tension between the two characters before readers get to the farm. Would Maria be as maternal as Thea remembered her from the show? Why does Thea need her to be? Who is the real Maria Capello? What if she is a monster? And what is her secret ingredient? Who can Thea trust? Who can the readers trust?
I loved the structure of The Dead Husband Cookbook. There are present-day chapters with Thea, memoir-and-confessional-style chapters with Maria, and Maria’s recipes in between. Each recipe somehow signifies whatever Maria has just shared with Thea in the manuscript. These felt satirical at times, maddening and unsettling at others.
A few scenes with Thea at the farm felt slow or repetitive, but never enough to make me stop reading. The conclusion was complex, unravelling thread by thread, keeping readers on the edge of their seats until the very end.
The Dead Husband Cookbook is an absolute page-turner. It’s perfect for readers who enjoy mystery, thriller, and horror blends. It’s a fiercely feminine and timely exploration of parenthood, marriage, and family. And how unfair all of it really is.
I recommend this book to fans of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, The Sopranos, and The Best Way to Bury Your Husband by Alexia Casale.
