The Ghost in the Pantry - The Hearth & Hollow Mysteries, #3

The pantry has been trying to tell Edie Hartwell something all summer.

The jars keep turning to face the wall. The cold keeps gathering along a seam where there is no seam. And when the wall is finally opened, the Hollow Hearth Bakery gives up the secret it has held for four generations: a hidden chamber, a handful of parcels wrapped in wax paper, and the Keeping Book, a ledger of everything the village ever trusted the Hartwell women to hold. Rings. Letters. Promises. Each with a name. Each with a word that unlocks it.

Four entries were never claimed.

Within the week, Gilbert Foss, antiques dealer, house-clearance man and quiet collector of other people's secrets, is dead at the foot of his own cellar stairs. The village calls it an accident. Edie has heard that one before. Because Mr Foss had been asking about her walls before anyone knew what was in them, and the last appointment in his careful little diary was only two letters long.

With a sceptical detective who keeps buying the same two loaves, a rival tea-room owner whose family history is wrapped up in one small silver spoon, a gossip network faster than any police radio, and a ginger cat who has very firm opinions about the pantry, Edie follows a sixty-year-old secret from the keeping shelf to the church organ loft and learns that, in Hearth Hollow, the hardest thing to do with a secret is what her great-aunt did all along: keep it kindly.

The Ghost in the Pantry is Book Three of The Hearth & Hollow Mysteries: warm-hearted village mysteries with clever clues, found family, a slow-burn spark, no gore, no swearing, and a bakery that keeps rather more than bread.

Includes Sylvie's Keeping Loaf recipe.