Sugar Creek Secrets

When retired developer Robert Calloway returns to the small Blue Ridge town of Sugar Creek, Virginia, nobody is glad to see him. He's been meeting with property owners, making offers they don't want, and carrying secrets from twenty-two years ago that someone would rather keep buried. Three months after his return, he's found dead at the old Hargrove mill — and fourth-generation bakery owner Magnolia Byrne finds herself doing what the Byrne women have always done: paying attention until the truth comes up. With her seven-pound Yorkshire terrier Biscuit at her heels and a notebook in her apron pocket, Magnolia moves through Sugar Creek's complicated loyalties the way she moves through her kitchen — with patience, precision, and the understanding that the right question, asked to the right person over the right slice of cake, will eventually open every door. As she untangles a twenty-two-year web of arson, fraud, and a fire marshal who called an arson accidental because he set it himself, she's also navigating something she didn't expect: Deputy Sheriff Cole Whitaker, who has been worth the twenty-year wait and who is, finally, the right moment. Sugar Creek Secrets is the first book in the Sugar Creek Bakery Mystery Series — a warm, atmospheric cozy mystery set in the Virginia Blue Ridge, filled with small-town secrets, slow-burn romance, fourteen real tested recipes, and a very remarkable little dog. Some things stay buried. Some things don't. And in Sugar Creek, Magnolia Byrne is always paying attention.