The Victory Cake Murders

Nell Ashcombe has been coaxing cakes out of a wartime ration for three years, and one of them is now evidence. On the morning she is to deliver the squire's wedding cake, the groom's brother is found dead in the pantry, his mouth full of her almond icing. The doctor says heart attack. Nell knows her own icing, and she knows it was the wrong colour — and she knows the cake has grown a tier overnight. With her evacuee nephew Joe and a village doctor who keeps turning up at closing time, Nell follows the swapped cake through chapel collections and black-market sugar sacks to a photographer with a forged will and a very small camera. Everyone in the parish wants the wedding. Nell wants the truth.