A Recipe for Murder

There are two smells baker Marit Engstrom has never known to lie: bread proving, and a person about to ruin her afternoon. On a foggy May morning in the seaside village of Kalmar Cove, her kitchen has both — and the second one is wearing Shalimar and a camel coat that has never been near a boat.

Vivian Thorne was once the most feared restaurant critic in San Francisco, and she has never let anyone forget it. Now she rules over Kalmar Cove's beloved community cookbook with a red pen and a talent for making enemies. She cut the diner owner's grandmother's chowder. She named the foraging woman in print. She tidied Marit's cardamom buns down to eight-point type. And when she collapses on the café floor mid-launch, the whole town knows exactly which sharp tongue has gone silent — and exactly whose famous buns were on the table.

The trouble is, Marit made a joke that morning. About foxglove. In her own kitchen, to her cat, where the wrong person could hear it through the open back door.

Now the Saltwater Shelf — half bookshop, half café, the place that kept a widow upright through three hard winters — sits under a cloud of suspicion, and the village is whispering. Marit can't simply wait for the truth to rise. With a shelf of old poison lore, a sharp eye for the fine print everyone else skims, and one twenty-pound Norwegian Forest cat who has clearly read your whole file, she begins to sift quiet grudges from very real grief.

Everyone loved the cookbook. Not everyone loved the critic. But someone folded murder into the menu — and a killer who has plated one course may already be hungry for the next.

Warm, witty, and salted with sea air and fresh-baked secrets, A Recipe for Murder is a cozy mystery to savor. Pour the coffee, warm the buns, and start reading today.