An apple is an honest clock. A cake built to keep will lie to you all night long.

Sage Holloway-Yates has spent the winter restoring the oldest house in Crescent Harbor — a failing wreck with a stone hearth wide enough to park a rowboat in, and room at last for thirty years of a dead friend's papers. On the night the Hearthlight Murder Mystery Club holds its first meeting, sixty people eat cake by the fire and drink to the town's history.

By morning, the genealogist who'd been cataloguing that history is dead at the bottom of her cellar stairs.

The state calls it a fall. The sergeant has nothing to argue with. And Sage would let it go — except she watched Gideon Larkin lay out his index cards in the same painstaking order for nineteen mornings, and the cards on that crate are in a pile.

Nobody reopens a closed ruling over a stack of paper. So Sage does the only thing a food scientist can do: she goes back down to the cold cellar with four apples, a thermometer, and a question about how fast things change.

Cozy throughout. No gore, no on-page violence, a black cat with firm opinions about where everyone should sit, and Sage's Keeping Cake recipe at the back.

Start here. You'll want to keep going.