The Candy Cane Caper

Sadie Hoffmiller has a full Christmas ahead of her. For the first time since she and Pete married five years ago, both of their families are gathering in Fort Collins, Colorado, there is a snowstorm in the forecast, and she has the Cunningham candy cane cake to bake.

She has also made a promise. Her old neighbour Mary Hallmark, now in a nursing home with pancreatic cancer and almost completely blind, wants her family's heirloom ornaments — a legacy collection, irreplaceable — on what she knows will be her last tree. Sadie goes to fetch them from storage and finds some of them are gone.

The thirteenth of Josi S. Kilpack's culinary mysteries is a warm, seasonal cozy: a small theft, a friend running out of time, a Colorado holiday full of relatives, and recipes threaded through the chapters, with Sadie — former schoolteacher, current amateur sleuth — quietly refusing to let Mary's last Christmas be spoiled.