Just Desserts

She solved nine murders in Blackberry Bay. The tenth found her on her honeymoon. She has concluded the problem is her.

Twenty-six hours into her first week of married life, Beatrice Hartley — née Honeywell, still adjusting to the name — finds herself standing over a dead celebrity chef in the dining room of a remote moorland hotel, with a storm cutting off the roads, a husband who is technically the senior law enforcement present, and the unwelcome certainty that, wherever she goes, people are apparently going to die face-down in their desserts.

Auguste Bellini was the greatest chef of his generation — and, everyone agrees once he is safely dead, a tyrant. His kitchen ran on fear. His staff had motive. His wife had endured fifteen years of careful, invisible ruin. His brilliant sous-chef was on the verge of defection. A feared food critic who'd destroyed him once happened to be dining incognito. And the storm has locked them all in together, with no police for miles, and a bride in evening dress who is, as it turns out, rather better at this than anyone has yet admitted.

The key to the murder — as Bea discovers, in the particular way she always discovers things — is in the food. Specifically, in who could bring themselves to poison it. A true cook never poisons their food. It goes against something too deep and too beloved. Which means the killer is not the sous-chef, not the weeping commis, not the critic, and not anyone who loves what they make. The killer is the person who lived in a kitchen all their life and never once loved it — because the thing she made was never sacred. It was just the weapon he never thought to guard against.

Just Desserts is the tenth and final book in The Cinnamon Cottage Mysteries — the warm, witty, deeply satisfying conclusion to Bea Hartley's story. A country-house locked-room mystery on the moors, a killer whose confession will break your heart, and a husband who tells his wife, under the wheeling stars, that her gift for seeing people is not a curse but the finest thing he has ever witnessed in a person.

A cozy mystery series finale with a grand hotel, a locked moorland, a celebrity chef, a bride who solves murders, and a love story that earned its ending ten books in the making.

Includes two recipes: Bea's Chocolate Collapse and Aunt Maud's Salted Caramel Sauce. Taste your caramel. Off your own spoon. With a clear conscience.

The door is always open. The welcome is warm. And everyone — everyone — is seen, and known, and gathered home in the end.