A SMOKING BUN

A weird murder that stuns residents of Ashland, Oregon, threatens to blight the coming New Year’s celebration.

Ashland is popular with residents and tourists alike for its natural beauty and its vaunted Shakespeare Festival. Juliet Capshaw Montague, the owner of Torte, a local bakeshop, is busy dealing with in-laws visiting from Spain. The first excursion she has planned, a nighttime snowshoe trip high on the ski mountain, doesn’t turn out quite the way she pictured. Their guide, Hero, is professional and cautious, but the outing is rudely interrupted by another guide, Fitz, a rule-breaking bully who shoves past them with two ladies, all on cross-country skis. The trio quickly get into trouble when Fitz takes his charges off the trail, and Hero has to call the ski patrol to rescue them. That minor bump in the road is nothing compared to what happens at the yearly downhill dummy contest, where fantastical dummies are sent down a slope to face spectacular wipeouts. Fitz, who seems to have been in the wrong place, is impaled by pieces of the last dummy, and Kendall Hankwitz, whose family owns the resort, insists that his death is murder. Jules has worked with her detective stepfather, known as the Professor, before. Despite a busy schedule entertaining her in-laws and furiously cooking and baking for holiday parties, she and her pals in crime-solving step up to help. Fitz was certainly disliked, but some of the revelations they uncover about the resort may provide even stronger motives for murder.

A many-faceted mystery often overwhelmed by delightfully detailed descriptions of culinary prep sure to delight foodies.