A beloved old woman dies of a tired heart. Her baker friend is the only one who notices the pills are wrong.
In the coastal town of Crescent Harbor, Maine, Sage Holloway-Yates measures her mornings in cardamom buns and her Fridays by the murder-mystery club at the library. She's a baker first and a sleuth only when she has to be — and when Frances Boudreau dies two counties south, days before she could hand over a fragile piece of her family's history, the whole world is content to call it her heart.
Everyone but Sage. Because a pill that crushes to chalk isn't medicine, and a death that looks too natural is sometimes the most careful kind of murder.
As the law reaches for the obvious suspect — Frances's estranged, money-hungry son — Sage follows the one thing that doesn't fit: a method far too cold and too patient for a grieving man. What she uncovers is a stranger with forged credentials, a stolen half-page of 1854 arithmetic, and six drowned sailors who were robbed of their wages and their names... and someone gracious, beloved, and utterly untouchable, who will do anything to keep them buried.
To get justice for Frances, Sage will have to do the hardest thing a baker ever learned: keep the names — and keep her own face.
The Bitter Ledger is the third Moonlight Harbor mystery: a warm, twisty whodunit of food-chemistry clues, off-page murder, found family, and a town that keeps its dead by reading their names aloud. Murders happen quietly and off the page; the bread, the cat, and the Friday-night club are always front and center.
Entirely free of gore. Includes Sage's cardamom bun recipe.
Perfect for readers who love small-town amateur sleuths, slow-burning series mysteries, culinary cozies with recipes, and a clever heroine who solves crimes between the loaves.
