Cheesecake and Confusion

Julia South-Brown agreed to babysit her half-brother at Peridale Manor for one quiet evening. Instead she finds herself in the middle of a burglary, and her father's home stripped of the few valuables he had left.

The timing could not be worse. Her husband's second novel has stalled, her adopted daughter Jessie has troubles of her own, and Julia's father and stepmother are far closer to bankruptcy than anyone in the village suspects. With her bakery to run and her family unravelling, Julia has every reason to stay out of it — and no ability to do so.

The eighteenth Peridale Cafe mystery keeps to the series' comfortable Cotswolds register: cake, gossip, a tightly plotted village crime, and a sleuth whose family life is as tangled as the case.