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The Series
Ten-book cozy mystery series with a recurring cast. Book 1 is always free — meet the village, then keep going.
BOOK 1 FREEThe Porthgowan Bakehouse Mysteries
10 books · cozy mystery
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.
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BOOK 1 FREEThe Little Hemlock Mysteries
10 books · cozy mystery
A village named for a poison. A judge dead over his ceremonial cup. And one woman who knows exactly what killed him. Little Hemlock is the prettiest village in the county — honey-coloured cottages, a humpbacked bridge, best-kept village three years running. It is also, if you know your Latin and your churchyard weeds, the deadliest name on the map. Dilys Ashcroft, sixty-four and fourteen months a widow, has folded herself away into her late husband's greenhouse, his disgracefully disobedient lurcher, and the particular grief of a woman who still makes only half the bed. She has let the world get on without her. Then, at the centenary Flower and Produce Show, the tyrant head judge drops dead over his ceremonial cup of saffron tea — and the whole village agrees, comfortably, that it was his weak heart and the tummy-bug going round. Dilys knows better. She spent forty years as a botanist, and she can read a hedgerow the way other people read a newspaper. She knows the one thing no one else in Little Hemlock does: that what killed Gordon Purslowe was never saffron at all. With a green young constable for her only ally and a whole community determined not to listen, this quietly underestimated plantswoman must trace a poison hidden in a jar of honey. But every border in the village is blooming with the same bare pink flower this September, every neighbour has a grievance the dead man had earned, and the gentlest soul in Little Hemlock is beginning to notice that the plant lady has noticed far too much. Bitter Saffron is a cosy English mystery with real teeth — dry as a good gin, warm as a kitchen at half-six, and threaded through with the ache of starting again. For readers who like their murders traditional, their sleuths sharp, and their villages just a little too pretty to be safe. Some things bloom out of season. Some of them are meant to.
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