Crumbs and Punishment

She found a man dead in a Father Christmas suit at the Christmas market. This was not the festive season she had planned.

Beatrice Honeywell's first Christmas in Blackberry Bay was supposed to be perfect. The Cinnamon Cottage had a holly-hung market stall, the spiced-cider buns were selling out faster than she could bake them, the fairy lights were heroically twinkling against the Atlantic dark, and Detective Inspector Sam Hartley was leaning on her counter eating his third mince pie and pretending it was professional surveillance. Everything was warm and bright and exactly right.

And then, in the village grotto, behind a queue of children clutching wish-lists, the Father Christmas stopped moving — and Bea discovered, rather against her will, that she had found her third body in eight months, and that Blackberry Bay was perhaps not quite the quiet life she had imagined.

The dead man is Nigel Crabbe: parish councillor, one-man disaster, snoop of the first order, and — as the days pass and the village begins to breathe again — a blackmailer. Because it turns out that Blackberry Bay is full of people with small secrets, and Nigel Crabbe knew every one of them, and had been quietly bleeding his neighbours dry for years. Suspects, therefore, are not in short supply.

But one suspect is different. One woman came to Blackberry Bay not for a quiet life but for a hidden one — carrying a new name, a small granddaughter, and a secret far more dangerous than anything in Crabbe's notebook. And her mince pies, Bea notices, were not pricked. A tiny thing. The sort of thing only a baker would see. And the thing that changes everything.

Crumbs and Punishment is the third book in The Cinnamon Cottage Mysteries — a warm, funny, surprisingly moving British Christmas cozy mystery set in a twinkling seaside village, complete with a Christmas market, a very opinionated cat, a slow-burn romance that is absolutely progressing thank you very much, and the saddest, warmest, most Blackberry Bay Christmas imaginable.

Includes two festive recipes: The Cinnamon Cottage Mince Pies and Bea's Christmas Spiced-Cider Buns. Prick every mince pie. You'll understand why.

The fires are warm. The welcome is warmer. And the mysteries always find their way home for Christmas.