Caught bread handed

Jules Capshaw runs a bakeshop in Ashland, Oregon, and her husband Carlos has just come back to town. She is still working out how she feels about it. Carlos wants her to take him back, and she has to decide whether to stay where she is or start over somewhere new.

It is winter, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is dark for the season. The bakeshop stays busy anyway, with dough to roll and orders to fill, so Jules has little time to sort out her marriage.

Then Mindy Nolan, who owns a new restaurant in town, is found dead. Jules knows Mindy had bad blood with several people in Ashland, and she starts tracking down who might have killed her. The search is not one she welcomes, and it pulls her away from her work and from the question of what to do about Carlos.

This is a cozy mystery set in a bakeshop, with a small-town amateur sleuth, a romantic thread about a possible reconciliation, and a light, food-flavored tone. The pace mixes baking-room routine with the investigation, and the stakes are a killer's identity and the future of a marriage.