BITTER DOUGH AND DEADLY LIES

The Seven-Thirty Bell always rings late. This year, it rang too soon.The Cypress Bend Founders' Day Bread Exchange is Charisma Finnegan's kind of event - dough to tend, demonstrations to run, and the familiar rhythm of people arguing about hydration while Marlene Jenkins redirects volunteers by sheer force of organization. It should have been a good day.Warren Castellan has been a fixture at Founders' Day for years - the judge who actually knows what he's talking about, the man who gives young bakers a fair chance, the one who borrows Charisma's water and never quite apologizes. When Cal Denny finds Warren dead in the rear supply corridor shortly after the Seven-Thirty Bell, the event stops and so does Charisma.The corridor was busy. Chairs moved, carts disappeared, volunteers crossed back and forth, and nobody was watching anything closely enough. Warren had spoken with Charisma before the Bell. He had intervened in an argument she hadn't fully witnessed. And someone, before his body was found, had already begun quietly rewriting the story of what Warren had decided to do next.As Charisma works backward through the afternoon - the preserves woman who saw Warren pass, the contestant Warren had quietly defended, the missing cart and the blue tape on its handle - a pattern takes shape. Not a crime of calculation, but something harder to name: the slow accumulation of pride, obligation, and a version of help that turned into a debt the other person never agreed to carry.Bitter Dough and Deadly Lies is the ninth book in the Charisma Finnegan Sourdough Mystery series - a mystery about mentorship, what we owe the people who helped us, and whether generosity can quietly become its own kind of control.