Shortbread and Belladonna

Hattie saw someone walk into the back room with the kettle. By supper, the whole town knew who it was. So did Maggie. They were all wrong.

It is January in Hollow Oak, and the heating-oil truck cannot get up the hill to the parish hall, so Maggie Thistlewood's first tea-collectors' exchange moves into The Steeping Room: forty people in wet coats, a ledger, a tray of shortbread, and a visiting appraiser named Edwin Lark, who has come to look at a pressed nightshade specimen that one old Hollow Oak family would rather nobody looked at too closely.

By evening Lark is dead in Pittsfield, a pair of numbered blue willow cups has become the most important thing in the shop, and one of them cannot be found.

Hattie, who misses nothing, saw a figure with its back to her go into the lit room. Someone told her a name. She repeated it, the town repeated her, and Maggie, who should have known better, repeated it too, to the police. Now Maggie has the times written out in Ida's old book, a duplicate ledger, a stool that cannot have held what it was supposed to hold, a cat who has opinions about where cups belong, and a statement with her own name on it that she is going to have to take back.

Shortbread and Belladonna is the seventh Hollow Oak Cozy Mystery: a fair-play whodunit built from things you can check, a winter tea shop full of people who all saw part of the afternoon, and an amateur sleuth who learns that being sure is not the same as being right. It ends in Worcester, with an old record and a name in the margin.

Each Hollow Oak mystery stands on its own. Start here, or start with Fair Tea and Foxglove.