Fans of the “Big Stone Gap” series loved Adriana Trigiani’s writing style and ability to bring voice to characters. Her latest series achieves the same strong sense of character in a vastly different setting: New York City.

Trigiani started this trilogy last year with “Very Valentine”; Book 2 is “Brava Valentine” (Harper, $26).

In the first book, we met Valentine Roncalli, the heroine who is one of four children of a loud, loving Italian family. Valentine is the apprentice to her grandmother in a business making custom shoes, struggling to balance her career with a rocky romantic life.

That theme continues in “Brava Valentine,” as Grandma decides that Valentine and her uptight brother Alfred will take over the shoe business. That’s because Grandma has remarried and moved to Italy, leaving Valentine as the decision maker for the Angelini Shoe Co. And while there is supposed to be conflict between Valentine and her brother, Trigiani glosses over most of their business clashes, focusing instead on the problems that stem when Valentine catches Alfred cheating on his wife.

That bit of adultery reopens the hurt Valentine felt growing up when her father cheated on her mother, and helps explain why she seems reluctant to commit herself to her steamy Italian boyfriend, Gianluca.

Trigiani does a fine job making Valentine a flawed character, so we can sympathize as she makes misstep after misstep. She overeats sometimes, she drinks one glass of wine too many and she makes romantic mistakes with Gianluca, like missing lunch dates or coming home hours later than she promised.

In that respect, Trigiani makes Valentine much like a hard-charging businessman, and that’s what Valentine is as she travels to Buenos Aires to meet the long-lost branch of the family as she tries to expand her shoemaking business.

While the first book ended with a romantic cliffhanger — will Valentine and Gianluca get things together? — the second one ends in a similar vein. Before we reach that point, though, Trigiani exposes the prejudices, marital woes and financial problems of Valentine’s three married siblings. Aha! Maybe our heroine will realize that those perfect marriages of family and friends she sees from the outside aren’t so perfect after all.