Hot Cross Bones

She has found five bodies in Blackberry Bay. She has decided this is simply her life now.

Easter Saturday. The village green transformed — bunting, a maypole, a coconut shy, children in egg hunts, church bells ringing, daffodils everywhere. The Cinnamon Cottage has a stall, Sam Hartley is making terrible change in his shirtsleeves, and Beatrice Honeywell is floury and happy and completely at peace with her extraordinary crooked little life.

Then Major Aubrey Tremaine — pompous, beloved, the man who runs absolutely everything — stumps over to buy a hot cross bun, tells Bea it is "not bad, though your aunt's had more spice," and goes off to shout at the coconut shy. Twenty minutes later, Bea finds him dead behind it.

The bun was fine. It's always the bun that's fine. The poison, it turns out, was in his hip flask — his daily private "medicinal," which the whole village knew about, which anyone could have doctored at any point that morning. Which means the whole fair full of people is a suspect. And the reason, when Bea finally finds it, is not the Major's bluster or his interference, but the quiet, meticulous, deeply respectable fraud he had stumbled onto by accident — a fraud that had been running for two years, hidden in perfect double books, by someone so well-regarded in Blackberry Bay that nobody had ever thought to look.

Hot Cross Bones is the fifth book in The Cinnamon Cottage Mysteries — a warm, funny, deeply satisfying British Easter cozy mystery, set in a village in spring bloom, complete with a fair, a flask, a murder in plain sight, a cat who takes the whole thing entirely seriously, and a harbour wall in the golden evening where something rather important happens at the very end.

Includes two recipes: The Cinnamon Cottage Hot Cross Buns and Aunt Maud's Simnel Cake. Keep an eye on your flask.

The buns are spiced. The welcome is warm. And everyone in Blackberry Bay — the pompous, the overlooked, and the frightened alike — gets seen, in the end.