Baking Spirits Bright by Sarah Fox Narrator: Jesse Vilinsky
Series: True Confections Mystery #2
Published by Penguin Audio on October 10, 2023
Source: Purchased
Genres: Cozy Mystery
Length: 8 hrs 13 mins
Pages: 288
Format: Audiobook
Purchase at Bookshop.org or Audible
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In a cute new culinary cozy from USA Today bestselling author Sarah Fox, budding chocolatier Becca Ransom must solve a murder before she meets a sticky end.
Winter has arrived in Larch Haven, Vermont, bringing with it holiday cheer, lots of snow, and freezing temperatures. Becca Ransom is squeezing in time to skate on the frozen canals and drink hot chocolate by a roaring fire while also whipping up new creations for her family’s chocolate shop and experimenting with holiday flavors like eggnog, gingerbread, and peppermint. At the same time, Becca is preparing for the Baking Spirits Bright holiday baking competition, a popular annual event. She’s planning to enter an edible model of Larch Haven, with a mountain backdrop made of cake, gingerbread cottages, and chocolate gondolas on sugar-glass canals.
Professional bakers and a local food blogger are also participating in the event and they aren’t about to go down without a fight. The competition quickly heats to a boiling point, with flaring tempers and mysterious happenings. When one of the entrants is found dead, stabbed with Becca’s chocolate chipper, Becca tries to salvage the season by finding the killer. But the heat is on, and Becca is in danger of getting burned.
Baking Spirits Bright is a pretty typical cozy mystery, which I mean in a good way – I enjoy the formula. We have a cute small town setting, a culinary theme, a cop as the potential love interest, two mischievous cats, and this time around it’s Christmas. I did not read the first in the series, but I didn’t feel like I missed much. Becca has moved back to her hometown and is busy preparing holiday sweets for the family chocolate shop. Her best friend and sidekick, Dizzy Bautista, convinces her to enter the annual Baking Spirits Bright competition, but the excitement of the contest is dampened when one of the bakers is murdered. Even though her friend, Sawyer Maguire, who is on the local police force, tells Becca to stay out of it for her own safety, Becca can’t help but launch her own investigation into the death.
The dead woman was not a nice person, so we have plenty of suspects. There are also plenty of townspeople willing to gossip, so Becca is able to get information by talking to people and keeping her ears open, but of course ends up in a couple of legitimately dangerous situations. I did not guess who the killer was, even though there were a couple of clues.
This one was a lot of fun. Becca and her friends and family are great and supportive. The town seems like a wonderful place to live. And all the treats sounded delicious. It also includes recipes, which I haven’t tried yet.
About Sarah Fox
Sarah Fox, writer of cozy mysteries, was born and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, where she developed a love for mysteries at a young age. When not writing novels or working as a legal writer she is often reading her way through a stack of books or spending time outdoors with her English Springer Spaniel.