The Wedding Breakfast

A wedding cake never killed anyone. Robyn Meade would stake her grandmother's bakehouse on it — and now she may have to.

For a year, Robyn has poured everything into hauling Meade's back from the brink: the queue out the door, the gold-lettered sign she can't stop looking at, the one-eared cat asleep on the proving cloth. The proof that she's finally made it is the commission of a lifetime — the towering saffron-and-clotted-cream cake for the Porthgowan wedding of the year, the day local girl Merryn Kellow marries into the moneyed Vyvyan family beneath a marquee with the whole Atlantic falling away behind it.

Then the groom's father raises his toast. Roland Vyvyan — bullying hotel magnate, sneerer at village baking, humiliator of anyone who carries his plate — takes a slice of Robyn's cake, and drops dead at the top table before the band can strike up.

The verdict is instant and ruinous: the amateur's cake killed him. But Robyn made every crumb with her own two hands, and she knows to a certainty there is nothing in a saffron sponge that could trouble a healthy heart. She knows, too, where the poison really hid — in the one thing every guest lifted and no one suspected. And she knows the killer is still out there, smiling among the wedding party, content to let an innocent take the fall while a good woman's livelihood burns.

Warm, wry, and steeped in the salt air and clotted cream of coastal Cornwall, The Wedding Breakfast is a cozy mystery with real teeth — a story of second chances, quiet courage, and a village where the postmistress can read a blush at forty yards. Robyn came home half-drowned in her own life. Now she'll have to prove that the thing she loves most didn't kill a man — before someone decides she should never bake again.

The tide is making. Best watch it.