Death by Chocolate Eclair

The meanest judge on British television died on live television, eating one of her chocolate éclairs, and Bea Honeywell is having a summer.

It was supposed to be the happiest summer of her life. Engaged, finally, to Sam Hartley. The bakery thriving. The Blackberry Bay Regatta on the horizon, with its harbour-front Food Festival, its baking competition, and the remarkable news that Damien Sharpe — television's most feared and loathed celebrity chef — is coming to judge.

Bea should have known. She always should have known.

Damien Sharpe dies on the judging platform, in front of four hundred people and three television cameras, with a chocolate éclair halfway to his mouth — and the whole thing, the murder included, is recorded in high definition. The footage shows exactly who was where. It shows exactly what Sharpe ate. It shows, in perfect detail, every person on that platform, and it tells Bea absolutely nothing about who did it — because the killer was there the whole time, invisible in their ordinariness, standing six feet away in plain sight, as patient and precise as a person who has spent eighteen months building a life as someone else, waiting for exactly this moment.

Behind the murder is a stolen recipe, a ruined young chef, and a woman who sat across a table from Damien Sharpe every day for a year and a half, making his coffee and carrying his bag and smiling politely, and waited. It is the saddest story Bea has caught yet. It is also, she admits privately, the most understandable.

Death by Chocolate Éclair is the sixth book in The Cinnamon Cottage Mysteries — a warm, witty, genuinely moving British cozy mystery set at a summer food festival, complete with a baking competition, a television crew, a very opinionated cat, a slow-burn romance now very happily engaged, and a killer whose motive will break your heart even as it satisfies your justice.

Includes two recipes: Leo's Chocolate Éclairs and Bea's Apple Day Turnovers. Never — never — make the éclairs for someone you mean harm.

The footage shows everything. It explains nothing. The whole truth is in the éclair.