The Proof of the Pudding

A locked cellar. No wound. No poison. Not a soul within a hundred yards. And one pastry chef who knows that the deadliest killers are the ones you can't see working.

A year ago, Robyn Meade came home to Porthgowan a burnt-out London chef with scorched hands and a heart to match, ready to bury her grandmother and sell a bakehouse she'd never wanted. Instead she stayed — and turned a failing shop with the wrong name over the door into the beating heart of a Cornish harbour village reborn. Now the trade has come back like the mackerel, the paint is fresh on the quay, and the Midsummer Harbour Festival is set to attempt something no village on this coast has ever tried: a record-breaking cream tea served the length of the harbour, in a single hour, every scone and dollop made in Porthgowan. Robyn's ovens are the engine of it. For the first time in her life, she has almost everything she never let herself want.

Then Julian Rashleigh turns up dead.

The smooth developer who meant to buy the village back to itself at four pounds a slice is found in the sealed pilchard cellar he came to gut — with no mark on him and no way in or out. Everyone calls it a tragic accident. But Robyn has spent her life mastering the slow, invisible magic of fermentation, and she knows a cleverly hidden thing when she meets one. As the festival draws the whole county down to the quay, she begins to pull at a thread that runs deeper than one dead man — toward a small brass key, a name buried under her own shop sign, and the truth about who her grandmother really was.

Warm, salt-scoured, and quietly wise, with a heroine you'll want to hand a cup of tea, The Proof of the Pudding is a cozy mystery to savour — a village you'll long to belong to, a puzzle you won't put down, and a secret forty years in the rising.

Some things never stay sunk forever.