The Keeping Cookie

For fourteen years Merritt Arbogast made food look perfect for the camera in New York - lacquered turkeys, glycerin-glossed pies, cookies that were never meant to be eaten. Now she's trying something radical: real cookies. Her late great-aunt left her The Pennyroyal Tin, a heritage cookie shop in a West Virginia mountain town where sorghum tea cakes are a birthright, recipes are guarded more fiercely than deeds, and nobody is quite sure what to make of the city girl who photographs everybody's plate.

Two weeks after Merritt opens, the town gathers at the Grange Hall for its 98th Christmas Cookie Exchange, a tradition older than anyone in the room. Before the day is out, Gussie Pugh, the formidable Keeper of the Recipe Roll, is dead in the Grange pantry with a pink peppermint cookie on her saucer. Everyone says it was her heart. Merritt sees something else: the pink is the wrong pink. With a sheriff's deputy who wishes she'd go back to Manhattan, a rival baker with a grudge, a cousin who thinks Merritt stole her inheritance, and a blacksmith-historian who knows every family's cookie cutters going back a hundred years, Merritt has to read the evidence the way she reads a plate - what was arranged, who it was arranged for, and how long it's been sitting there.

The Keeping Cookie is the first book in the Pennyroyal Tin series. It's a clean cozy mystery with a complete solution, a slow-burn romance, a town you'll want to visit, and no graphic violence, explicit content, or strong language. Pour a cup of coffee, open a tin, and meet the woman who knows that every cookie at the Exchange carries more history than anyone wants to admit.