Layer Cake Larceny, The: A Cozy Mystery of Stacked Suspicious and a Tiered Trick

?? Quilt shop owner and fabric stack specialist Lily Layer is hosting a layer cake cutting party when the shop's most competitive customer—a notorious quilt show champion—is found dead in her store, crushed under a toppled tower of layer cake stacks. The police suspect a tragic accident, but Lily notices the fabric stacks have been deliberately unbalanced and the victim's quilt contest entries contain suspiciously similar patterns to other quilters' work. With her shop temporarily closed and the quilting community divided, Lily must peel back the layers of this fabric-filled mystery. Assisted by her cutting crew and the handsome textile analyst examining print patterns, Lily uncovers a scheme involving pattern plagiarism, stolen quilt designs, and a sophisticated operation copying award-winning quilts. From suspicious print rotations that reveal intentional mirroring to color placements that match other quilters' work too closely, every stacked layer tells a story. But when Lily discovers the victim was systematically entering copied quilts in competitions under different names, she realizes the killer is protecting creative integrity more valuable than any blue ribbon. With the national quilt competition approaching and the real copycat still stacking deception, Lily must sort through the evidence before her own reputation gets permanently layered under suspicion.