Some weddings end in tears. This one ends in a body.
Twelve months ago she left a Denver dining room and a collapsed marriage and came home to a mountain town she had stopped calling hers. She meant to stay a week. She stayed to run her dead sister's catering company, in her sister's kitchen, under her sister's copper pans, cooking her sister's recipes slightly wrong.
Now Copper Whisk Catering has one shot at a comeback: a hundred and forty guests, a destination wedding at the lodge above town, and a mayor who will not stop calling it a flagship weekend. She has worked harder rooms than this. The allergen cards are color-coded. The run-sheet is timed to the minute. Nothing is going to go wrong.
Then the groom drinks to his bride during the first dance, and before the song ends he is dead on the ballroom floor.
By morning the sheriff has impounded every dish that left her kitchen, three clients have cancelled, and the town is quietly deciding what to believe. She knows exactly one thing for certain: whatever killed that man did not come off her pass. Proving it means rebuilding the night second by second, out of guest phone video and security stills and a tray of champagne that stood unattended in a corridor for fourteen minutes, and asking questions the mayor's office would very much prefer she left alone.
And there is the other thing. The diary in the bottom drawer of her sister's desk, which she found a week ago and has not opened since. Three sentences, in her sister's handwriting, dated three weeks before she died at the bottom of her own staircase.
I heard them talking. I don't think I was supposed to. I need to be careful.
A small Colorado town where everyone is somebody's cousin. A sous chef who has decided to bring Iago into service this week. A cake decorator who tracks the pollen count like a war correspondent. A librarian who can turn out the entire town by half past four in the morning. A lodge owner who makes two batches of coffee before dawn and will not say why.
No gore. No profanity. One body, one very good kitchen, and a chef who has never in her life served a plate she could not explain.
A Toast to Die For is the first Copper Whisk Mystery. If you like your small towns specific, your amateur sleuths competent, and your murders solved by somebody who reads a room the way she reads a kitchen, pull up a stool.
