Scone but Not Forgotten

She promised herself she was finished with murders. The murders did not get the memo.

Beatrice Honeywell is perfectly happy making cinnamon whirls, perfecting her sourdough, and carefully not thinking about the way Detective Inspector Sam Hartley's grey eyes crinkle when he smiles. She is a baker. She makes bread. She is absolutely not a detective, and the business with Marcus Blackwood was a one-time thing, and the quiet cobbled life of Blackberry Bay is quite enough for her, thank you very much.

Then the vicar arrives on her doorstep in the middle of a storm, soaked to the skin and white as his dog-collar, and tells her that Colonel Harcourt of Harcourt Manor has been found dead at the foot of his great staircase — and the roads are flooded, the police are ten miles away, and every member of the Colonel's gathered family had something to gain from the old man not living to read his newly changed will.

Bea and her best friend Rosie arrive at the dark, rain-lashed manor house to find a family in perfect, polished grief — and underneath it, a tangle of gambling debts, forged paintings, and a secret thirty years old that someone was willing to kill to keep buried. And then there is the scone. One small, telling, shop-bought scone, in a kitchen that makes everything from scratch — the kind of detail only a baker would notice, in a house full of very careful liars.

Scone but Not Forgotten is the second book in The Cinnamon Cottage Mysteries — a warm, witty British cozy mystery in the classic country-house tradition, complete with a locked-down manor, a full cast of suspects, a cat who takes the whole thing very seriously, and a slow-burn romance that is very definitely progressing, whether Bea admits it or not.

Includes two of Aunt Maud's recipes: proper hand-made scones and Blackberry Bay blackberry jam.

The scones are made by hand. The mystery is in the details. And the killer, as always, is in the room.