Tea, Tarts, and Treachery. A Gripping Cozy Mystery of a Tea-Shop Murder, Village Secrets, an Anonymous Letter, and the Motive Nobody Saw

Gran didn't do it. Beatrice is sure of that. She is slightly less sure the detective agrees. Beatrice Wainwright left a suffocating London career to open the Nook & Kettle - a tea room wedged between a crooked bookshop and Little Hedley's village green. She came home for scones, silence, and second chances with the woman who raised her. Not for murder. But the Summer Fete ends with Marcus Thistle, the most despised property magnate in the county, toppled face-first into the Victoria sponge.
Dead. Poisoned with foxglove snipped from Gran's own garden, folded into a tart Gran baked, at a fete Gran attended. The detective seems content to close the case before the clotted cream sets. Beatrice has one week. She knows this village. She knows the recipe cards exchanged over Darjeeling, the whispered grudges, the feuds that outlast the gossip. Marcus Thistle had enemies from the allotment society to the church council - his planning scheme would have bulldozed the library and half the high street, and more than one person's livelihood hung in the balance. Her investigation winds through a dusty bookshop basement packed with love letters, a rival baker's spotless kitchen that smells of marzipan and convenient lies, and a half-built housing estate where Thistle's enemies outnumber the bricks.
A silent business partner with a gambling habit. A church treasurer with doctored accounts. A cryptic note tucked inside a second-hand cookery book - the clue everyone dismissed as a bookmark. Then the warnings start. Warm scones on the doorstep. Garden gates swinging open in the night. A message piped in icing sugar: Stop asking questions, or you'll spoil the batch. Someone is watching. And someone has far more to lose than their reputation. With Gran's hope fraying and the clock running down, Beatrice must decide how much she's willing to risk - her business, her fragile new beginning, her own safety - to serve a truth that nobody in Little Hedley wants to swallow. Tea, Tarts, and Treachery is a warm and cunning cozy mystery about small-village secrets, a granddaughter's fierce loyalty, old grudges, and a killer hiding in plain sight among the roses. Perfect for readers who love British cozy mysteries, tea-shop settings, amateur sleuths, bookshop charm, village whodunits, and fans of Anthea Fraser and Rachel Ekstrom Courage. A twisty, cozy whodunit you'll devour in one sitting.