Hearthlight Murder Mystery Club: The Careful Hand (Book 3 of 5): Hearthlight Murder Mystery Club, #3

A man came home to a town that spent thirty-one years sure he was a thief. One week later, he was dead at the foot of the archive stairs — and everyone agreed it was an accident.

Everyone but the baker.

Sage Holloway-Yates knows how things age. It's what a food scientist learns and a baker never forgets: milk, apples, bread — every material keeps its own honest time, no matter what story you dress it in. So when a loaf at the scene of a tidy little accident turns out to be far too stale for the hour it's meant to belong to, Sage knows the tidy little accident is a lie.

Crescent Harbor has finally gathered its scattered records into one room — every attic and cellar of the town's paper, catalogued at last. Cornelius Whitcomb came back after three decades to read one page of it and clear his name. He never got the chance. Now the whole town is certain he died for what he was digging up — the old founding secrets, the fortune everyone half-believes is buried in all that dusty paper.

Sage doesn't believe a word of it. Because the thing that bothers her isn't grand or buried. It's small, and cold, and physical — a heel of bread that spent its last night somewhere it shouldn't have. And with a decent man about to be arrested for a crime he didn't commit, Sage has until the end of the month to prove what really happened, using the only witnesses in Crescent Harbor that cannot be told what to say: a loaf of bread, and the age of the ink on a page.

Somebody in this town has spent thirty-one years being someone they're not. And a careful hand can bury a great many things — but it cannot make a fresh thing old.

The Careful Hand is the third Hearthlight Murder Mystery Club cozy: a fair-play, small-town whodunit with a genealogist's cold case, a cast of retired sleuths who've done this before, a solid black cat with opinions, and — as always — a recipe. No gore, no bad language, no cliffhanger. Just a warm room, a cold clue, and a truth the town would rather not read.

Each book solves its own murder. Together they tell a longer story about who decides what goes in the record — and what happens to the people it leaves out.

You can start here. But Sage has been at this a while, and there are two books before this one if you'd like the whole of it.