An edgier riff on Agatha Christie. Murray takes common tropes and pierces them with darker realities to great effect.-Oprah Daily

Arya Winters is your typical cozy heroine. She lives in a cottage in a small English village, and bakes for a living - well, she specializes in macabre desserts. She has nosy neighbors, who she avoids ruthlessly due to her social anxiety. And she has a keen interest in all things sexy, especially Branwell Beam, the writer next door.

When her neighbor Tobias Yards turns up dead after eating poisoned tiramisu (definitely not poisoned when she baked it), no one seems to connect it to Arya's Auntie Meera's recent death. Instead, they blame her excruciatingly average ex-boyfriend-and Tobias's nephew-and so she takes matters into her own hands. Now all she has to do to uncover the truth is to get over her aversion to Other People. Besides that, it's just a matter of getting beyond some yellow tape, dodging her former BFF Tallulah from secondary school, and getting into Branwell's pants-he seems strangely reluctant.

What Arya doesn't realize is that the murderer is dangerous, preying on lonely people who've experienced trauma, and that she might have to do all she can not to become the next victim.

Arya Winters Books