On Thin Icing

It is the dead of winter in Ashland, Oregon, the tourists are gone, and Torte, the family bakeshop Jules Capshaw runs with her mother, is quiet. So when the directors of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival ask her to cater an off-season retreat at a mountain lodge, Jules takes the work gladly.

Then the retreat's bartender, a notorious flirt with a famous temper, turns up dead in the walk-in freezer. Worse, Jules's estranged husband Carlos has reappeared in Ashland and lands squarely on the list of suspects. Snowed in with a lodge full of theatre people who all had reason to want the man gone, Jules starts working the case the way she works a recipe.

The third Bakeshop Mystery is a cozy small-town whodunnit with a warm ensemble, a lot of pastry, and a heroine whose personal life is every bit as tangled as the murder.