The Sweet Ruin

Three days. One hurricane. A wedding cake worth forty thousand dollars and a lie that has been rising for twenty-five years.

Ondine Vasseur is the best pastry chef in the Southeast, and she has spent eleven years wearing a name that isn't hers. When a handwritten commission arrives from Halloran Island, Georgia, she tells herself she is going for the money. She is not. She is going because the island took something from her once, and she has finally come to ask for it back.

Lucan Ferreira is paid to find the lie. A senior investigator for Corvane Assurance, he arrives at the Halloran estate to look into a suspiciously generous life insurance rider on the groom. He doesn't expect the family to be this polished, the attorney to be this helpful, or the pastry chef in the kitchen to be the one person on the island he can't read. He definitely doesn't expect that one taste of her burnt-sugar glaze will make him forget what he came to do.

Then the storm turns toward the coast. The causeway floods. The phones go dead. And someone in the house makes certain the wedding will never happen the way it was planned.

Trapped with a grieving mother, a silent sister, a frightened bride, and a groom who keeps saying he has been waiting a long time for her, Ondine and Lucan have until landfall to find out who is lying, who is dying, and what really happened in the old boiling house, the one with the chain on its door.

Why readers can't put it down:

Slow-burn romance with real heat. Two guarded people, one storm, and a pull neither of them can afford.
A locked-island mystery. Every character is hiding something, and every clue is hidden in plain sight.
A twist that rewrites the whole book. You will want to go back to page one the second you finish.
Food that feels dangerous. Caramel at 320 degrees, strange jars, and a pantry where nothing is quite what the label says.
Cinematic and relentless. Short, fast chapters count down the hours to landfall, so "one more chapter" turns into 2 a.m.

For readers of romantic suspense, gothic mysteries, and stories where the setting is as dangerous as the secrets, The Sweet Ruin is the stormy, swoon-worthy page-turner you have been looking for.

Sugar keeps what it is given. Pick it up tonight, and find out what this island has been keeping.