Title: Delights & Deadly Disasters
Author: Renee Lyles
Date: 2023
Quote: "Chocolate would be good too. Dark and bitter, laced with nuts. Like her life."
Maggie thinks that when her boyfriend tells her he's in love with someone else. She decides she's never really liked her job and work in the big city, and might as well go back and reopen the bakery where she worked as a kid, which the owner had recently died and left to her in a will. The color, flavor, and nut content of her life do not change.
Right away Maggie comes back into contact with her worst friend from high school, the homecoming queen who compulsively competes with other people, who married the football star and has been miserable ever since, who thinks Maggie's bakery is just what she needs to open her business. Mindy follows her right into the cafe, and faints when they find the dead man stuffed into the freezer.
He was the mayor, and everyone in the small town hated him. And Mindy's a suspect because the mayor had closed the bakery shortly before the owner, an elderly cardiovascular patient, had a fatal heart attack. Also, she comes to realize, because the sheriff likes her and wants to protect her, having quickly realized that, as she's not the homicidal type, someone else might come after her, too.
Meanwhile Maggie witnesses a hit-and-run accident, adopt the dog, and finds herself asking her worst friend for advice. Mindy's obnoxious but she does know a lot about dogs. Maggie starts thinking of her as potentially a friend worth knowing, after all. But it's the recovering dog, not Mindy, who protects Maggie when the real murderer does come after her.
This qualifies as a cozy mystery in the sense that only one person is murdered. If working out the logical solution to the question of who killed an unlovable person nobody'd ever miss is the way you like to relax, you'll enjoy Delights & Deadly Disasters.
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