Blood and Saffron

You cannot rush the gold. It's the first thing Loveday Meade's book teaches — and the last thing anyone in Porthgowan wants Robyn to learn.

Spring on the Cornish coast, and Meade's Bakehouse is turning a hundred. Robyn Meade came here two years ago a burnt-out pastry chef with nothing left to lose, and instead she found a crooked flat above a shop, a one-eared cat who considers her staff, and the slow furious wish to know the truth about the grandmother whose name she carries. Now, page by grudging page, she's coaxing a lost recipe out of Loveday's coded book — the fabled saffron, honey and almond Tregoning tart — to crown the centenary. And she's close to something far larger than a tart: proof that the sixty-year whisper against her family is a lie.

For as long as anyone remembers, Porthgowan has murmured that Loveday came in on the winter boat under a borrowed name and stole what wasn't hers. Robyn has hired a gentle genealogist, Edith Nankivell, to trace the old Tregoning estate through the county paperwork — and one bright evening Edith telephones to say she's found the thing that changes everything.

By morning Edith is dead in a burned-out cottage, her research gone, and the police are calling it a tragic accident.

But Robyn has spent her life reading fire. She knows the moods of her own cloam oven blind, knows the colour of an honest flame — and this fire is lying to her. Someone in this beautiful, gossiping little cove would rather commit murder, and burn a hundred-year-old bakehouse to its bones, than let an old wrong come to light. Someone the whole village adores.

Warm, tart, and steeped in salt air, saffron and secrets, Blood and Saffron is a cozy Cornish mystery for readers who like their villages charming, their heroines stubborn, and their buried truths every bit as dangerous as the people guarding them.

Some recipes were never meant to be found.