THE CAKES OF WRATH

After a narrow escape from a runaway van leaves cake shop owner Rita Lucero battered and bruised, she finds a friend's wife dead back at the shop - with her own painkillers clutched in the woman's hand. That's enough to set homicide detectives gunning for her.

Rita Lucero, owner of New Orleans cake shop Zydeco Cakes, can’t seem to stop saying “yes.” Even though things at the bakery are busy, Rita finds herself accepting a seat on the local small business alliance—a group full of colorful characters like Chopper Shop owner Moose Hazen and his wife, Destiny, whose personal life is messier than a cake someone left out in the rain. On the street following a heated alliance meeting, Moose pulls Rita out of the path of a speeding van. Shaken and bruised, Rita notices the next day that her prescribed pain killers are missing. When she discovers Destiny’s body in the couple’s shop, the stolen pill bottle in her lifeless hand only adds another layer to her mysterious death. But getting the frosty NOPD detective to stop focusing on Rita and look for Destiny’s real killer will be anything but a cakewalk…

Jacklyn Brady is the author of the previous New Orleans-set Piece of Cake Mysteries, A Sheetcake Named Desire, Cake on a Hot Tin Roof, and Arsenic and Old Cake.