Sign-In
Cart
A Recipe for Checkmate
Paperback
Series: Jeanine Hudson Mysteries, Book 1
Please select the version of book you would like to purchase.
ISBN10: 1967892288
ISBN13: 9781967892280
Publisher: White Jade Publications LLC
Published: May 27 2026
Pages: 216
Weight: 0.56
Height: 0.49 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
ISBN13: 9781967892280
Publisher: White Jade Publications LLC
Published: May 27 2026
Pages: 216
Weight: 0.56
Height: 0.49 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
A blizzard, a chess conspiracy, two murders, and an outsider baker who reads people the way she reads recipes: carefully, completely, and always looking for what's missing. The storm came in fast on the second evening of the Bald Mountain Lodge chess invitational, and by the time the wind reached the ridge, it had made the decision for everyone: no one was going anywhere.
Jean Hudson, the lodge's new baker, had been planning to stay regardless. The job was a stopgap, one more chapter in the ongoing project of a woman who had recently lost everything and was attempting to rebuild from the most basic ingredients. She had flour on her hands, a small room on the service wing, and no investment in the tournament drama unfolding at the far end of the building. The chess players were polished, intense, and utterly absorbed in their own private game.
Jean was fine with that. She didn't need to know their stories.
Before the third round, Riley McHenry, the fifteen-year-old prodigy who had everyone talking, disappeared from his room in the night. Then Arthur Finch, a veteran player with a complicated relationship with the lodge's finances, was found dead in the east corridor. And Jean found herself doing what she had always done in her bakery, in her marriage, in every situation where the surface didn't match what was underneath: paying attention.
The people sealed inside Bald Mountain Lodge with her are not simply stranded strangers. They are the pieces in a game that has been running for years: a chess coach with blood on his hands; a lodge manager with gambling debts and misplaced loyalties; a fierce retired professor protecting a grandson she can no longer save; a young woman carrying her mother's wooden pawn as the only inheritance left to her. The conspiracy Jean unravels is elegant, old, and very cold. The moves were made long before the storm arrived. Jean is walking into the endgame.
She doesn't know chess. She knows something more useful: she knows how to find what's missing.
A Recipe for Checkmate is the first novel in the Jeanine Hudson Mystery series: a cozy mystery with real teeth, set in the snowbound isolation of the Colorado Rockies.
Jean was fine with that. She didn't need to know their stories.
Before the third round, Riley McHenry, the fifteen-year-old prodigy who had everyone talking, disappeared from his room in the night. Then Arthur Finch, a veteran player with a complicated relationship with the lodge's finances, was found dead in the east corridor. And Jean found herself doing what she had always done in her bakery, in her marriage, in every situation where the surface didn't match what was underneath: paying attention.
The people sealed inside Bald Mountain Lodge with her are not simply stranded strangers. They are the pieces in a game that has been running for years: a chess coach with blood on his hands; a lodge manager with gambling debts and misplaced loyalties; a fierce retired professor protecting a grandson she can no longer save; a young woman carrying her mother's wooden pawn as the only inheritance left to her. The conspiracy Jean unravels is elegant, old, and very cold. The moves were made long before the storm arrived. Jean is walking into the endgame.
She doesn't know chess. She knows something more useful: she knows how to find what's missing.
A Recipe for Checkmate is the first novel in the Jeanine Hudson Mystery series: a cozy mystery with real teeth, set in the snowbound isolation of the Colorado Rockies.
Also from
Kozeman, P. J.
Also in
Mystery & Thriller
Coffin Road: An Utterly Gripping Crime Thriller from the Author of the China Thrillers
May, Peter
Paperback
From $9.99
Sabine's Notebook: In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin & Sabine Continues
Bantock, Nick
Hardcover
$10.99
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Movie Tie-In Edition): Book 1 of the Millennium Trilogy
Larsson, Stieg
Paperback
$9.99
The Golden Mean: In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin & Sabine Concludes
Bantock, Nick
Hardcover
$9.99
Big Little Truths: Reese's Book Club: A Novel: The Sequel to Big Little Lies
Moriarty, Liane
Hardcover
$30.60
The Pirate Queen: A Novel from the New York Times Bestselling Author of the Frozen River
Lawhon, Ariel
Hardcover
$28.80
The Altar of Pergamon: The Mystery of the Dark Angel and the Future of the World
Cahn, Jonathan
Hardcover
$28.49