The Sourdough Alibi
A Cozy Mystery

About this book:

In the salty dawn of Wildwood Harbor, baker Cleo Wood discovers her seventy-year-old sourdough starter murdered—poisoned with photographic stop bath—and her landlord, developer Jasper Vance, dead in the flour-dusted pantry beside a brass dough scale. The only witness is Cleo's own unreliable memory: a bicycle accident left her with fractured recall, and her meticulous bakery log shows yesterday's final entry written in blue ink she doesn't own, in handwriting that mimics her own. With the police chief pounding on the back door and a footprint trail that doesn't match her clogs, Cleo has until opening time to prove she didn't kill the man who wanted her bakery razed for condos—while someone else in town holds the missing half of a typewritten threat.

Between batches of cinnamon rolls and boules, Cleo kneads through a rising tide of suspects: the milkman who saw Vance's car at six, the mayor's brother with a badge and pressure from above, the historical society matriarch guarding harbor secrets, and a shadowy "M" who summoned Vance to the bakery after hours. Every clue—a grease-penciled letter, a hotel pen, construction dust, a bruised knuckle Cleo can't explain—pulls her deeper into a decades-old property fraud that reaches from the town hall to the state capital. But in a kitchen where timing is everything, the most dangerous ingredient is the half-hour of missing memory that might hold the truth—or condemn her.

Warm, atmospheric, and plotted with the precision of a perfect crust, *The Sourdough Alibi* serves up a heroine whose greatest weapon isn't a knife but a leather-bound ledger and the stubborn refusal to let gaps in her mind become gaps in her defense. For fans of Ellie Alexander and Jenn McKinlay, this debut whodunit proves that in a town built on secrets, the best alibi is the one you bake yourself.