Frosted with Malice

She built the cake. She didn't expect it to become evidence.

When Cora Rossi-Ashford accepts the commission to create a five-tier champagne buttercream masterpiece for the Harrington-Thorne wedding, she expects the biggest challenge to be the hazelnut praline. She doesn't expect to find the groom dead in the walk-in cooler the morning of the ceremony.

The Maple Creek sheriff's department has a theory. The groom's business partner had motive, opportunity, and a financial dispute that had been building for months. But Cora noticed things at the rehearsal dinner that don't fit the obvious answer - a phone call overheard in a hallway, a door seal that didn't quite catch, a pharmacist sister-of-the-bride whose composure seemed less like calm and more like conclusion.

Cora isn't a detective. She's a baker. But she pays attention, and paying attention in Maple Creek has a way of leading somewhere uncomfortable.

With help from her social-media-savvy assistant Peggy, the town's formidable elder Agnes Whitmore, and a tabby cat named Biscotti who turns out to have better instincts than most humans, Cora follows the trail from a Boston hotel dinner to a Portland pharmacy to the most precisely calculated crime she's ever encountered - one where the method was medicine, the motive was justice, and the answer changes everything she thought she understood about what it means to stop something terrible from happening.

A wedding cake for eighty-three people. A murder with no obvious villain. A small town that holds more history than it shows.

FROSTED WITH MALICE is the second book in the Maple Creek Bakery Mystery series - a cozy mystery full of warmth, food, complex characters, and the particular complications of small-town life where everyone knows everyone's grandmother.