CELTICLADY'S REVIEWS: Bread Over Troubled Water (A Bread Shop Mystery) by Winnie Archer Blog Tour!

About Bread Over Troubled Water

Bread Over Troubled Water (A Bread Shop Mystery)

Cozy Mystery 8th in Series

Setting - California Kensington Cozies (November 29, 2022)

Mass Market Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages

ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1496733568

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1496733566

Digital ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09TX2QMZY

Rising cozy mystery author Winnie Archer cooks up her latest installment in her delightful and delicious Bread Shop Mystery series.

Photographer Ivy Culpepper is soon to make a home with her husband-to-be in the California beach town of Santa Sofia—but the Yeast of Eden bakery remains her second home. It’s not just a place to work, but a community. And now one member of the community has been murdered . . .

A regular who used Yeast of Eden as a workspace, Josh Prentiss always turned heads with his startlingly good looks and thousand-watt smile. But Ivy can’t help noticing one morning that he seems distracted and off his game. Later, during a visit to the park where she and Miguel plan to hold their engagement party—with plenty of baked goods on the menu—her rescue pug, Agatha, sniffs out Josh lying in a bed of poppies…scone cold dead.

There’s no reason for Ivy to get involved. She’s busy enough holding down the fort as the shop’s owner, Olaya, cares for her recently orphaned niece, not to mention the stress when a new employee is fired and storms out in a rage. Then a band of rabble-rousers starts picketing the bakery, claiming that Olaya’s sourdough roll is what killed Josh—and Ivy hears some salacious gossip about her beloved boss. She doesn’t think there’s a grain of truth to the seedy rumors—but to prove it, she’ll have to start sleuthing . . .

Excerpt

Esmé had been in the same Bread for Life cohort as Zula. Where Zula was a boisterous and strikingly beautiful woman from the East African country of Eritrea—and could run circles around any of us—Esmé came to the United States from Zacatecas, Mexico, had escaped a bad domestic situation, and now was back on her feet. While I missed Maggie’s youthful antics, Esmé brought a calm serenity to the bread shop, which balanced out Zula’s brightness. She was an excellent fit.

Esmé tied the strings of her white apron, sneaking a look at Olaya and raising her brows at some- thing Olaya had muttered in Spanish. I leaned over the bakery display case, beckoning to Esmé and raising my brows. “What’s she saying?”

Before Esmé could respond, Olaya slammed the phone down and spun around. She pointed at Esmé. “Ayudar a los clientes con Zula. Help the customers.” Then she directed her fiery eyes at me. “Mija, por favor, I need your help.”

With my own mother gone, Olaya, along with Penelope Branford, my eighty-something neighbor, had been slowly filling in the hole in my heart. “Anything,” I said. I had my camera-bag strap slung over my shoulder. I perpetually snapped photos. The breads, the kitchen staff, the customers, the park, the ocean, the sand, the flowers. You name it, I photographed it. Now I swung my camera bag onto my back and followed her into the kitchen, leaving Zula and Esmé to the growing line of customers.

Olaya marched through the sleek, stainless-steel- heavy kitchen without even a sideways glance at the morning crew. She didn’t need to worry about what was happening. The place ran with precision and expertise. Felix, Olaya’s protégé in the truest sense of the word, worked the grain mill, an enormous pine and millstone contraption, turning heirloom wheat into hundreds of pounds of flour each and every day. Rye. Spelt. Cornmeal. Buck- wheat. Olaya wanted an array of freshly ground grains, and the Osttiroler mill did the heavy lifting.

As the person in charge of the bread shop’s website, I’d done a lengthy write-up on just how important the Osttiroler was to Olaya Solis and the bread she baked. “The quality of the flour is the heart and soul of any loaf of bread,” she’d once said, a statement I’d put online. “A bread shop that grinds its own wheat—compared to flour in the supermarkets? It is like comparing apples and oranges. They are two different things altogether.” Working here, even part-time, I’d learned a new set of vocabulary words, too. Terroir. Noun. How soil and climate and sunlight affect the flavor and character of wine grapes. It holds true for wheat, I’d learned. No two wheat fields are the same.

Felix was in his mid-twenties, pretty much lived in his three-quarter-sleeved chef shirt, and had a Pillsbury Doughboy belly. He was a jolly sort, true, but he was an old soul, and he was a magician. He was Rumpelstiltskin, turning stalks of wheat into finely ground powder rather than gold, which he then used to bake the most divine bread this side of . . . well . . . anywhere.

About Winnie Archer

Winnie Archer is the nationally bestselling author of the Bread Shop Mystery series, as well as the Lola Cruz Mysteries and the Magical Dressmaking Mystery series written as Melissa Bourbon. A former middle school English teacher, lives in North Carolina with her educator husband, Carlos, and the youngest of their five children. Visit Winnie Archer online at www.MelissaBourbon.com!

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