Lily O'Connor has poured everything into her Sweet Hollow bakery. The Harvest Festival is supposed to be her moment - the one day a year her prize-winning pumpkin muffins get the recognition they deserve. Instead, she finds the town's most feared food critic face-down in her display batch, stone-cold dead.
The poison came from Lily's own pantry.
The footage shows her hot-headed younger sister slipping something into the batter.
Now Detective Nick Marlowe has what he thinks is an open-and-shut case, and Lily's sister is sitting in a cell.
Lily knows what she saw. She knows her sister. And she knows this town.
So she starts asking questions.
Every crumb leads deeper. The critic had enemies from the mayor's mansion to the corner bookshop - jealousies simmering for years, old grudges folded into the fabric of Sweet Hollow like a secret ingredient nobody wanted to name. He'd destroyed careers with a sentence and buried livelihoods with a star rating. Half the festival wanted him gone.
And someone was willing to kill again to keep the real reason buried.
With each clue Lily uncovers, the picture grows darker - and the killer more desperate. The coziest town in the county is hiding something rotten at its center, and the closer Lily gets to the truth, the more certain she becomes that the next body found at the festival could be hers.
She didn't ask for this. But she's the only one who cares enough to dig.
Muffins, Motive, and Mayhem is a charming and twisty cozy mystery about small-town secrets, sisterly loyalty, culinary rivalry, wrongful suspicion, and the truth hiding in plain sight.
Perfect for readers who love amateur sleuth mysteries, small-town murder whodunits, culinary cozies, festival settings, and fans of Anthea Fraser and Rachel Ekstrom Courage.
A twisty, cozy whodunit you'll devour in one sitting.
