Cinnamon Roll Secret

Two weeks after the mayor of Willow Hollow died on a bench outside her bakery, the Historical Society is still ordering two dozen cinnamon rolls every Tuesday. Nobody has cancelled it. That is the first thing that bothers Yue Lin. The second thing is the box from last week, sitting on the shelf behind the new director's desk, opened and closed again, with the parchment folded flat - and Yue has folded that paper corner to corner her whole life, the way her mother taught her. By Wednesday morning there is a second body in Willow Hollow. Neil Brubaker, sixty-one, a contract archivist the town hired to inventory the Historical Society's collection before the county takes it. He is at the bottom of the basement stairs. The medical examiner calls it a fall. The county closes it in forty-eight hours. Yue does not close it. Because Neil Brubaker told her, the day before he died, that her mother's name had come up in a box of papers - and because his reading glasses were folded and set down neatly on the third step from the top, and people who fall down stairs do not stop to fold their glasses first. She has a bakery to run and a town that has split in half over the woman who killed the mayor. Half of Willow Hollow thinks Gwen Aldridge was driven to it. The other half wants the Historical Society emptied and the whole thing forgotten. Somewhere in the middle of that is a dead man, a missing page, and a question nobody wants asked: What did Neil Brubaker find? And the answer has been sitting on top of Yue Lin's refrigerator for twelve days. The Cinnamon Roll Secret is the second book in the Willow Hollow Bakery Mysteries - a small-town cozy with a fair-play puzzle, a slow-burn romance that stays firmly unspoken, one orange cat with no interest in helping, and three recipes from The Butter & Crumb.