Death Takes the Cake


Book Description

To help boost ratings for her show, Della Carmichael agrees to enter a televised cake competition sponsored by Reggi-Mixx, even though the company’s owner, Regina Davis, is an old college nemesis. When she finds someone drowned in a mixing bowl of batter, Della realizes solving this murder will be no cakewalk.




Murder Takes the Cake


Book Description

A routine cake delivery becomes a culinary nightmare when a small-town baker discovers her first client's dead body in this irresistible new mystery series. It'll take more than a little sugar to convince folks Daphne Martin's freshly baked spice cake was not to blame for the mysterious death of town gossip Yodel Watson. Getting her new cake decorating business, Daphne's Delectable Cakes, off the ground is hard enough now that Daphne's moved back to her southern Virginia hometown, but orders have been even slower since she found Yodel's body. She soon realizes, however, that just about everybody in town had a reason to poison the cantankerous busybody, from the philandering pet shop owner, to Yodel's church potluck nemesis, to the Save-A-Buck's cranky produce manager-turned-bagger. Now, to help prove she's no confectionary killer, Daphne recruits her old flame, Ben Jacobs, editor of the local newspaper, and quickly stirs up a long-hidden family scandal that just might hold the secret ingredient she needs to solve the case. All she's got to do is roll up her sleeves and get her hands a little dirty before the real culprit decides that taking sweet revenge on Daphne will be icing on the cake.




Rabbit Cake


Book Description

People Magazine Book of the Week A Best Book of the Year at Kirkus Reviews, Book Riot, The Chicago Review of Books, Minnesota Public Radio, and more An Indies Introduce and Indie Next Pick Fans of Maria Semple's Where'd You Go Bernadette and and Kevin Wilson's The Family Fang will delight in Annie Hartnett's debut, a darkly comic novel about a young girl named Elvis trying to figure out her place in a world without her mother. Elvis Babbitt has a head for the facts: she knows science proves yellow is the happiest color, she knows a healthy male giraffe weighs about 3,000 pounds, and she knows that the naked mole rat is the longest living rodent. She knows she should plan to grieve her mother, who has recently drowned while sleepwalking, for exactly eighteen months. But there are things Elvis doesn’t yet know—like how to keep her sister Lizzie from poisoning herself while sleep-eating or why her father has started wearing her mother's silk bathrobe around the house. Elvis investigates the strange circumstances of her mother's death and finds comfort, if not answers, in the people (and animals) of Freedom, Alabama. As hilarious a storyteller as she is heartbreakingly honest, Elvis is a truly original voice in this exploration of grief, family, and the endurance of humor after loss.




Death Takes the Cake


Book Description

To help boost ratings for her show, Della Carmichael agrees to enter a televised cake competition sponsored by Reggi-Mixx, even though the company’s owner, Regina Davis, is an old college nemesis. When she finds someone drowned in a mixing bowl of batter, Della realizes solving this murder will be no cakewalk.




Cake Or Death


Book Description

A brilliant new book from one of Canada's most popular columnists - a no-holds-barred riposte to the mess we've made of things. Mrs. Tittlemouse is heaven in a sponge mop. I read Beatrix Potter's books as a child and love her paintings, her stories, her home-boiling of squirrels so her watercolours could be anatomically exact. But most of all, Beatrix Potter made domesticity desirable. All right, she didn't, but she domesticated me. Personal order has become my badge and it's the only thing that really works with melancholy. Heather Mallick is sorely disappointed. The world has not turned out quite the way she had hoped it would. But rather than retreat from it, she takes the world head on, fearlessly and formidably on her own terms. In a new work of entirely original writing, we have Heather unplugged (some might even say unhinged), and uncensored from the restrictions of her Globe and Mail column writing. As her many fans have come to expect from her, she is incisive and outrageous, whether she's cataloguing the many situations and items in our daily lives that we are told we should fear, teaching us how to cope with people we just can't stand (ruthless mockery is the key, really, says Heather) or writing about the valuable life lesson to be learned from one of her childhood heroes: Mrs. Tittlemouse, the original domestic goddess. A candid reflection on the complicated state of our lives and our world today, viewed through the lens of Heather's inimitable wit and outlook on life, Cake or Death: The Excruciating Choices of Everyday Life will provoke and delight readers.




Death by Chocolate Cakes


Book Description

In this scrumptious collection, revered chef Marcel Desaulniers serves up some of his most sinful, most seductive chocolate creations ever. An astonishing array of chocolate lovers from the "guru of ganache".




Killer Sweet Tooth


Book Description

Cake decorator Daphne Martin finds herself in the middle of a murder investigation—and an Elvis impersonator convention—with a bullseye on her back. Dead as a . . . dentist? They say sugar is bad for your teeth, but can it actually kill you? The Brea Ridge police seem to think so when they find cake decorator Daphne Martin wielding an oversized plastic toothbrush over a dentist’s dead body. Daphne moved back to her small Virginia hometown just months ago to open her Daphne’s Delectable Cakes business and already she’s been mixed up in murder. Now she’s got to prove her sweet innocence again. After hours of police questioning, Daphne returns home to find Elvis Presley in her driveway. She’s certain she’s hallucinating until the leather-clad hunk orders up a pink Cadillac cake for a convention of the Elvis impersonators. Daphne accepts, but her reporter-boyfriend Ben is suspicious of Elvis’s intentions. Does the King want to make Daphne his confectionery queen? Or is the convention a ruse for a more sinister operation? Daphne’s own investigation into Dr. Bainsworth’s murder, meanwhile, reveals the dentist made as many enemies as he did fillings. Just about anyone could have done him in, but it’s up to Daphne to find the killer—and finish Elvis’s cake—before she’s the one singing “Jailhouse Rock.”




Clever Jack Takes the Cake


Book Description

Take a bite out of this deliciously funny original fairy tale, which received four starred reviews and was named a Best Book of the Year by Booklist, School Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, and the Bank Street College of Education. What would you do if you were invited to the princess’s tenth birthday party but didn’t have money for a gift? Well, clever Jack decides to bake the princess a cake. Now he just has to get it to the castle in one piece. What could possibly go wrong? Candace Fleming and G. Brian Karas, creators of the bestselling picture book Muncha! Muncha! Muncha!, have teamed up again to bring us a modern fairy tale starring a determined boy and a story-loving princess with a good sense of humor. While girls will fall for a story featuring a princess’s birthday party, Jack’s adventures with trolls, bears, and gypsies make this the perfect read for young boys as well—and ideal for storytime.




Good Dog, McTavish


Book Description

A dog with a plan adopts a chaotic family in a wry comedy extolling the virtues of common sense. When Ma Peachey takes up yoga, the rest of the family finds themselves abandoned to chaos: no one cooks dinner, no one picks up the dirty laundry, the children are always late for school, and there is a good deal of squabbling and squalor. Ma may be off finding inner peace, but irritable Pa Peachey, glum Ava, and wannabe girl-charmer Ollie are falling apart. Only Betty, the sensible youngest child, is wise enough to see that this family is in need of rescue. Enter McTavish, a rescue dog who, true to his mission, is ready to teach this family some new tricks. Getting the Peacheys to behave will take work, but if anyone can do it, McTavish can. After all, he’s a very good dog — maybe even a psychological mastermind!




Dead Pan


Book Description

Book Two of Gayle Trent's cozy mystery series about a Virginia baker turned mystery sleuth. Once again Daphne Martin is the prime suspect when her baked goods are found at the scene of the crime.