Marshmallows and Memories

Julia South has a wedding cake to make. Her childhood friends Leah and Johnny are marrying at last, and the cake is refusing to cooperate, which is exactly the sort of problem Julia would like to be her biggest one.

Then builders working at the old primary school unearth a time capsule ahead of schedule, and there is a body inside it. The remains belong to a beloved teacher who vanished three decades ago; the village had always been told she had moved to Scotland. Nobody in Peridale went looking for her. Someone in Peridale knew exactly where she was.

With Barker, Jessie and the rest of her family around her, Julia works backwards through thirty years of village memory to unpick a cold case that everyone had comfortably agreed was not a case at all. Marshmallows and Memories is the twenty-fifth Peridale Cafe cozy mystery from Agatha Frost, blending small-village warmth, cake, and a murder that has been waiting a long time to surface.