Till Death Do Us Tart

She asked the universe for one perfect uninterrupted day of joy. The universe said no. Again.

On the morning of Beatrice Honeywell's wedding to Detective Inspector Sam Hartley, Blackberry Bay is transformed - bunting, blossom, a five-tier cake with sugar roses, a borrowed church, a beloved village gathered on the hill. Bea has a dress that makes her feel, for the first time in her life, actually beautiful. She has four hours of perfection.

And then she finds a body in the vestry before she's said I do.

Roger Ferris is a stranger to Bea - smooth, charming, a financial man who handled the affairs of half the county gentry. He is also, it quickly emerges, a man with a great number of enemies hiding in plain sight among her wedding guests - because Roger Ferris has spent years quietly stealing the life savings of trusting families across the district, and one or two of those families are represented, today, in their best clothes, in Bea's church.

What follows is the strangest investigation of Bea's life: a bride in a wedding dress and a groom in his best suit, working a murder scene while the whole village waits in the pews, guided only by a baker's habit of noticing things and a lifetime of understanding that the most devastating wrongs are the ones nobody bothered to see.

The killer is the person everybody loved. The victim is the man nobody mourned. The motive is the oldest and most human one there is: a wife, and a fraud, and a broken old man who died of shame, and a mother who decided that enough was enough.

Till Death Do Us Tart is the ninth book in The Cinnamon Cottage Mysteries - a warm, funny, and profoundly felt British cozy mystery about the love that outlasts everything, the justice that comes too late and still matters, and the village that turned the worst-best day in Bea Hartley's life into something she will love forever.

Includes two recipes: Bea's Wedding Bakewell Tarts and The Cinnamon Cottage Wedding Bread - baked with a hundred-and-fifty-year-old sourdough starter, for a marriage.

The cake was evidence. The village improvised. Love, it turns out, is more than equal to a spoiled wedding day.