A Sinister Sourdough

A sourdough starter is not a recipe. It's a family. And someone stole Ned Kellow's family in the night.

Beatrice Honeywell has a rival. His name is Julian Frost, his bakery is directly across the road from hers, his sourdough loaves cost eight pounds each and are photographed by influencers, and he called her cinnamon whirls "the nostalgia thing" with a pity so gentle it took her a moment to feel the knife.

She has been telling half of Blackberry Bay, for the entire fortnight he's been there, that she could cheerfully murder him.

And then, on Apple Day, she finds him at the bottom of an antique cider press, and the situation becomes considerably more complicated.

The difficulty — apart from the obvious — is that Bea has publicly been the person in Blackberry Bay with the loudest, most recent motive. And the investigating officer is her fiancé. And Sam Hartley, being the most scrupulously honest man she knows, cannot be seen to protect her — which means, for the first time in seven murders, he is asking Bea to do the thing she has never once managed: to stay out of it. To let him clear her name without her help.

She does try. For nearly a whole day.

Behind the body is a story about a hundred-and-fifty-year-old sourdough starter, begun by Ned Kellow's great-great-grandmother in a valley mill, fed every day through two world wars and a lifetime of faithfulness — and stolen in the night, a single spoonful, by a fashionable London baker who rebranded two centuries of another family's heritage as his own proprietary culture and sold it at eight pounds a loaf. It is a theft of something that cannot quite be named in law, and that cuts deeper than anything that can.

A Sinister Sourdough is the seventh book in The Cinnamon Cottage Mysteries — a warm, deeply felt British autumn cozy mystery about heritage, craft, stolen things, and the extraordinary lengths a gentle man will go to when everything his family ever was gets taken overnight.

Includes two recipes: How to Start Your Own Sourdough Starter and The Mill Sourdough Loaf. A sourdough begun today, fed faithfully, could be your family's in a hundred years.

The bread is ancient. The wrong was real. And the cider press, it turns out, is a great deal more dangerous than it looks.