Kolaches and Killers

Jessica catered her best friend's wedding as a gift. By noon, the best man was dead behind the building, and her chef coat was missing.

Chef Jessica Vasquez has fed Dashwood through every kind of day, but she has never once cooked a wedding. When Sawyer Hart, her best friend since they were twelve, finally marries Riley, Jessica takes the whole brunch on herself. Four hundred kolaches. Two hundred guests. Her gift to them, and she won't hear a word otherwise.

Then the best man steps out to take a phone call and doesn't come back. Jessica finds Dean Tibbets on the concrete behind the hall, in his good suit, with a party roaring on through sixteen inches of brick.

Her chef coat is gone off a hook in a back room no guest had any business standing in. There's a figure in white on the venue's one working camera. Tall. Dark hair. Close enough to Jessica's build that half the county has already made up its mind.

Somebody didn't just kill a good man at a wedding. Somebody picked Jessica to hang it on.

There's Cassie Cole, who couldn't take no for an answer and told Dean in a crowded post office lobby that he'd be sorry. There's Laurie Dunn, the cousin in the third row who once lied about a baby and spent three years laying the wreckage at Dean's feet. There's Lucio Castillo, who was owed eleven hundred dollars and stepped into Dean's route the same week he died. And there's the money Dean had no business having, riding through a loading dock in plain brown boxes that looked like the dullest freight in the building.

When a shot comes through Jessica's kitchen window with two nine-year-olds ten feet away, the thing that has been circling Dashwood since Falafel and Fatalities finally steps into the light. Jessica quits waiting for it to come to her.

Can a chef with a poster board and a coffee can of markers outthink people who plan a murder in the cold? Or is she the last loose end they have left to tie off?

Perfect for fans of cozy mysteries who crave:

•A wedding day that turns into a crime scene
•A frame job with a stolen chef coat at the center
•Found family who close ranks when it counts
•Small-town suspects with old wounds and longer memories
•A series arc that finally steps out of the shadows

Kolaches and Killers is Book 11 in the Alphabet Soup Mysteries series. While each book can be enjoyed on its own, the series is best read in order for full character development and ongoing storylines.