A Crumb of Doubt

Some people come home on the flood tide, triumphant. Robyn Meade comes home on the ebb — half-drained, running, and thirty-one pence to her name.

After a decade of being broken down in London's cruellest kitchens, pastry chef Robyn walks out mid-service, apron still on, and drives three hundred miles to Porthgowan, the little Cornish harbour village where her late grandmother's bakehouse has stood — and slowly crumbled — for sixty years. The plan is simple. Fix the roof. Fire up the ancient cloam oven. Save Meade's before the bank takes it, and learn to breathe salt air again.

Then celebrity chef Rufus Trewin sweeps in to judge the Midsummer Harbour Festival bake-off. A local boy turned bullying television star, he's the sort who made kitchens like the one Robyn fled. And in front of the whole village, mid-mouthful, on the sun-warmed quay, he drops dead.

The verdict is tragic accident. The whispers say otherwise — and every eye in the harbour turns to the bakers who fed him. But Robyn knows exactly what was on every plate that day, down to the last crumb of saffron. Whatever killed Rufus Trewin, it wasn't the baking. Someone wanted it to look that way.

With a sceptical detective itching to blame her buns, a one-eared cat winding round her ankles, and a steady-handed lifeboatman at her side, Robyn starts asking the questions nobody wants asked — about old grudges, buried names, and a village that keeps its secrets the way the tide keeps its dead. Because a killer who can bake as dangerously as she can is still out there. And the tide always brings something back.

Warm, wry, and rich with the smell of proving dough and diesel-and-weed harbour air, A Crumb of Doubt is a Cornish cozy mystery to sink into like a favourite armchair. Pour the tea. Butter a bun.

Then try to guess who did it.

Includes Gran's real Cornish saffron bun recipe.