The Icing on the Crime

She spent a week building the most beautiful cake of her life. Someone used it to commit murder. She took that personally.

Beatrice Honeywell's five-tier wedding cake - ivory fondant, hand-piped sugar roses, real spring blossom, the most ambitious thing she has ever made - is wheeled into the ballroom of Harcourt Manor on a silver trolley, and two hundred guests gasp, and Bea stands at the back with her heart full, and thinks: this. This is why I bake.

And then Lady Prudence Vane, the grand disagreeable godmother of the bride, rises to make a toast, takes one bite of the top tier, goes a terrible mottled purple, and dies face-first in the icing.

And Detective Inspector Sam Hartley - who is in love with Bea, and knows she didn't do it, and cannot clear her anyway because he is too honest a man to pretend otherwise just because he happens to be in love with the baker - has to sit across a table from her in a side room of Harcourt Manor and take her statement like everyone else's.

The murder weapon is Bea's cake. The victim is a wealthy woman with a room full of people who wanted her dead. The killer is the one person in that ballroom nobody looked at - invisible, overlooked, forgotten - who stood at the wedding cake all morning with a fine brush and steady trained hands, as patient as someone who has spent a whole life being unseen and has finally decided, at last, to be noticed.

The Icing on the Crime is the fourth book in The Cinnamon Cottage Mysteries - a warm, deeply felt British cozy mystery about the invisible people, the overlooked ones, and a baker with the dangerous habit of noticing exactly what everybody else misses.

Includes two recipes: Bea's Celebration Sponge with Royal Icing and Bea's Strawberry Summer Tarts. Never leave your wedding cake unattended in a room full of relatives.

The cake was beautiful. The murder was personal. And the killer, as always, was the one nobody thought to look at.