Cooking Up Sweets

For the first time since she opened her bakery, Samantha Sweet is staring at empty bistro tables and unsold pastries and wondering what’s going on. A few regulars still show up, the ovens still hum, but something is missing. When her daughter Kelly insists she take a quick break and attend a local estate sale, Sam reluctantly agrees. She expects dusty knickknacks and chipped teacups. Instead, she finds a stack of vintage cookbooks ... including one that refuses to be ordinary. Throughout the handwritten binder are symbols and margin notes that feel more like messages than measurements. As Sam begins testing the Depression-era recipes, she experiences some weird happenings and uncovers the story of the woman who once owned the book, a determined restaurateur who built a thriving business during the darkest years of the 1930s. Her menu brought customers and her dishes brought hope. But the deeper Sam digs, the stranger things become. Her wooden box reacts to the cookbook in ways she can’t explain. Sam experiences vivid images after tasting certain recipes. And when the elderly woman who hosted the estate sale dies, within days, under suspicious circumstances, Sheriff Beau gets involved. Meanwhile, Kelly is determined to pull Sweet’s Sweets back into the spotlight by entering the spring food festival baking contest. A win, especially with celebrity judges in attendance, could transform their fortunes overnight. But as Sam experiments with recipes that carry echoes of another era, she begins to suspect that someone else is out to sabotage her efforts. Could a recipe from the Great Depression somehow lead to murder in modern Taos? Or could one of the cookbook’s recipes hold a dangerous secret?