BLACKBERRY PIE MURDER

Lake Eden’s favorite baker, Hannah Swensen (Red Velvet Cupcake Murder, 2013, etc.), finds herself on the wrong end of a police investigation.

Dodging lightning on an icy road, Hannah finds herself facing a driver’s worst nightmare: Her car hits something, and all of a sudden, there’s a body lying on the pavement. Hours later, her mother’s fiance, Doc Knight, delivers his terrible findings. The man she hit was alive when Hannah struck him, and he died on impact. Sheriff Bill Todd orders Hannah’s arrest and fires Deputy Sheriff Mike Kingston for refusing to bring her in. Eventually, Hannah winds up in the Winnetka County jail, where she spends three days, surrounded by friends and family (and three nights covered in a fuzzy blanket supplied by boyfriend Norman Rhodes), before Judge Colfax grants her bail. Once sprung, amateur sleuth Hannah is faced with an unusual case. She knows who the killer is, but who’s the victim? Armed with scant physical details—height, weight, approximate age and a diamond set in one of the man’s teeth—Hannah sets out to find out exactly whom she killed. The investigation, of course, requires multiple dinners in Hannah’s cozy apartment, where she and Norman, her mom and Doc, her sisters Michelle and Andrea (the latter is too mad at her husband, Sheriff Bill, to eat at home), and even Mike brainstorm over plates of Smothered Chicken and Oodles of Noodles as Hannah’s cat, Moishe, and Norman’s cat, Cuddles, play “chase.”

It’s amazing how little a vehicular homicide charge changes Hannah’s life in Fluke’s good-natured 19th.