Death Bakes a Holiday

She can see ghosts, run a wine bar, and judge a Christmas baking contest. What she can’t do is keep the contestants alive.

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Two months into her new life in Prescott, Lorelei Cosgrove is finally starting to feel like she belongs. The wine bar is running smoothly, the Victorian's most opinionated resident is still her dead great-aunt Hazel, and Arizona's Christmas City is lit up like something out of a snow globe. So when the downtown merchants' association asks her to judge their annual holiday baking contest, Lorelei says yes — a night of showstopping cakes and sugar work sounds like exactly the kind of festive, low-stakes fun she could use.


Then one of the contestants turns up dead the morning of the competition, and the sugar work is the least of anyone's problems.


Sage Hollis was young, gifted, and building an empire out of a single boutique bakery — the kind of ambitious newcomer who'd ruffled plenty of old-guard feathers on her way up. Now she's a ghost tethered to the event hall where she died, unable to remember how it happened, and desperate for Lorelei to find out. The official theory is a foraging accident. But Sage knew her botanicals cold, her devastated little sister insists she'd never have made that mistake, and Detective Ruiz isn't ruling anything out.
Neither is Lorelei. Because the harder she looks, the more she realizes that everyone who came near Sage's workstation that day was hiding something — a poached pastry chef, a bitter rival, a smooth investor, a fired employee, a quietly worried shopkeeper. Every one of them had a reason to resent the woman. And in a town this size, secrets don't keep for long.


Ghosts can point. They can grieve. They can lead you exactly where someone wants you to go.


But they can't tell you who to trust.