Loaves and Alibis

Fresh sourdough at dawn. A cold body on the porch. And a seventeen-pound ginger cat who never forgets a clue...

Thirty-two-year-old Maisie Wren traded a burnout career as a Boston forensic auditor for her late grandmother's carriage-house bakehouse in picturesque Lantern Harbor, Maine. Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday before the sun comes up, Maisie loads forty-two warm loaves into Goldie-her butter-yellow 1968 Volkswagen bread van-buckles her one-eared ginger tabby, Brioche, into his passenger basket, and makes the Porchlight Bread Box run.

Because nobody knows a small town's secrets like the woman who visits its front porches at five-forty-five in the morning.

Then, on the foggy Thursday before the annual Harbor Harvest and Heritage Festival, Maisie pulls up to 14 Gull Cry Lane at 6:08 a.m. and knows immediately that something is wrong. The brass porch lantern is still burning. Tuesday's rosemary sea-salt boule is still sitting inside the cedar bread box-sweating and blistered as if it just came out of a freezer. And inside the sunroom lies historical board chairman Sterling Vance, dead beside a warm French press, a slice of caraway rye toast he was deathly allergic to, and an antique brass grain scoop stamped with the name of Maisie's beloved mentor, seventy-one-year-old master miller Arthur "Coop" Cooper.

The state police are ready to lock Coop up by sundown. To save him-and keep centuries-old Tidewater Mill from falling into the hands of a shadowy waterfront land trust-Maisie teams up with reluctant harbor constable Sam Callahan (Customer #19, seeded deli rye), sharp-tongued diner owner Tessa Morales, and retired deed registrar Imogene "Birdie" Finch.

Between a forged 1812 whalebone scrimshaw compass rose, an eighty-three-year-old widow's brass spyglass, a missing museum timer, and a secret hidden inside Gram Nan's handmade bread boxes for twenty years, the killer has carefully staged a Thursday-morning alibi. Unfortunately for the killer, staging a breakfast requires knowing a thing or two about bread.

Warm, witty, and packed with fair-play clues, Loaves and Alibis is a coastal Maine culinary cozy mystery about second chances, small-town friendships, pre-dawn baking, and the secrets neighbors leave on their porches.

Includes three tested home-baking recipes from Maisie's bakehouse at the back of the book: Rosemary Sea-Salt Sourdough Boule, Cinnamon-Cardamom Brioche Knots, and Brown-Butter Cheddar Harvest Scones!