Croissants and Conspiracy: A Honeyberry Falls Mystery

The snow is melting. The secrets are rising.The spring thaw has finally arrived in Honeyberry Falls, Vermont, but it hasn't brought the peace Penelope Marsh expected. While she struggles with the precise, three-day lamination of her new croissant recipe, a grim discovery at the North Block excavation site halts the town's progress. A skeleton has been unearthed in the foundations, and it is wearing a signet ring engraved with the Sterling family crest.The police call it a cold case. Penny calls it a blood debt.When Arthur Vane, the formidable patriarch of the city's most powerful law firm, arrives in town with an army of surveyors, the stakes shift from historical to hostile. He isn't after the land anymore; he is hunting for a specific archive lost in the firm's original Manhattan satellite office. To protect her town and her family's legacy, Penny must leave the safety of The Dusty Apron and return to the glass-and-steel canyons of New York City.Armed with a vintage brass key and her forensic instincts, Penny enters Suite 4402, a room that has been sealed since 1968. Inside, she finds evidence that her father wasn't just a silent partner; he was a whistleblower who spent his life tracking a half-century of corporate racketeering.From the shadows of Wall Street to the muddy trenches of Vermont, Penny and Detective Jaxson Miller uncover a conspiracy of "Eminent Domain" that spans generations. With the Vane family moving to seize the entire town under a fraudulent receivership, Penny has twenty-four hours to prove the truth. In the high-stakes world of probate and pastry, the layers of the past are as brittle as a croissant shell. One wrong move, and her entire life will crumble.In the third installment of the Honeyberry Falls Mysteries, P.J. Sterling delivers a crisp, atmospheric noir-cozy. It is a story of corporate greed, family redemption, and the perfect buttery flake.

Pagina's: 458, Paperback, Independently published