Gingerbread and Guilt (A Maple Creek Bakery Mystery)
This book is part 1 of the Maple Creek Bakery Mistery series
She baked the lanterns. She didn't expect one of them to mark the spot where someone died.
Every December, Maple Creek transforms. The town square fills with hand-crafted gingerbread lanterns, warm cider, and the kind of holiday magic that draws visitors from across the valley. Cora Rossi-Ashford has supplied the bakery's signature gingerbread lanterns to the Winter Lantern Market for three years running - sugar-glass panels, royal icing mortar, an LED tea light inside. Warm and small and steady.
This year, Theodore Whitmore has returned. The man who founded the original Lantern Market thirty years ago - and then vanished from Maple Creek in January 1994 - is back, older and unrepentant, full of plans to revive something the town has long preferred to leave buried. Agnes Whitmore, his estranged former sister-in-law and Cora's most loyal corner-table regular, is not pleased. Neither is anyone else who remembers the winter of 1993.
When Theodore is found dead among the market stalls on opening night, the sheriff's department opens an investigation. The town has a long memory and a short list of people who would grieve him. Cora isn't trying to solve anything - she's trying to finish her orders, manage her cat's ongoing objection to the cold, and not say anything she'll regret to Sheriff Ben Holt. But the more she listens, the more the past begins to reassemble itself in ways the official investigation hasn't noticed.
With help from Peggy, her assistant and unofficial social media strategist, and Agnes herself - who knows exactly what happened in 1993, and exactly how much she is willing to say - Cora finds herself navigating a mystery that is less about who hated Theodore Whitmore than about what he knew, and what he had come back to claim.
Snow is forecast for the weekend. The market must go on. And Cora's gingerbread lanterns, glowing warm and small and steady in the dark, are the only lights that don't cast shadows.
GINGERBREAD AND GUILT is the third book in the Maple Creek Bakery Mystery series - a cozy mystery full of warmth, seasonal atmosphere, and small-town secrets that run deeper than anyone admits. Perfect for fans of Joanne Fluke, Laura Childs, and Diane Mott Davidson.
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