Hearthlight Murder Mystery Club: The Marriage Sampler (Book 2 of 5): Hearthlight Murder Mystery Club, #2

A retired genealogist is dead at the foot of a scaffold. The town calls it a drunken fall. A slice of blueberry pie says otherwise.

Crescent Harbor is recutting its founding monument — a hundred and seventy years of getting the story wrong, about to be set right in new bronze. So when Alden Vane, the town's tireless amateur family-tree hunter, turns up dead the morning of the intake, everyone agrees it was an accident. An old man, a dark green, a fall.

Everyone except Sage Holloway-Yates.

Sage came to Crescent Harbor to bake, not to detect. But she's the woman who once read a browning apple and caught a killer — and now, standing over the scene with a baker's eye, she sees the one thing that doesn't fit: a cut pie is a clock, and this one is telling the wrong time. A fresh-cut slice can't lie about the hour a knife went into it. And the hour it names is one nobody was supposed to be awake for.

As the Hearthlight Murder Mystery Club gathers by the great hearth to sort the town's attics into evidence, an old cross-stitched marriage sampler surfaces from a stranger's hatbox — a lawful founding marriage the record had quietly erased. Soon Sage is holding two truths a killer would rather stayed buried: a page cut clean from a dead man's binder, and a founding story that comes apart the moment anyone reads it out loud.

The trouble is that the whole town has already convicted the wrong person out of pure kindness. And the one name the evidence keeps circling belongs to the last soul in Crescent Harbor anyone would ever suspect.

The Marriage Sampler is the second Hearthlight Murder Mystery Club cozy — a fair-play whodunit with a warm New England hearth, a bakery that runs on food chemistry, an amateur sleuth who'd rather be pulling bread than pointing fingers, and not a drop of blood on the page. If you like your mysteries clever, cozy, and solved with the tools of a real kitchen, pull up a chair by the fire.

Baker first. Detective by accident. And a pie that never lies.