Juliet Capshaw is a baker, and as the co-owner of Torte in Ashland, Oregon, she feels a duty to keep her customers happy. She and her staff do their best to keep the small town in coffee, pastries, cakes, pies, and lunches. While they are working at expanding their bakery with a wood stove and another kitchen, along with more seating, Jules still has to keep up with their daily baking offerings as well as their special orders like wedding cakes.
So when her best friend Lance comes into Torte demanding a dessert buffet for his Shakespeare-themed party, Jules feels she has no choice but to say yes to him.
Lance is the artistic director for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, is known for his dramatics, and this party may be his most extravagant. He’s insisting that everyone be in Elizabethan dress, and he wants the food to be authentic to Shakespeare’s times, including Jules’s desserts. With a little research on what that would entail, Jules is convinced that she and her team can pull it off, providing trifles and marzipan sweets for the event. And that’s a good thing, because for the first time in Jules’s friendship with Lance, he is genuinely afraid that his job is in jeopardy.
They are getting ready to open Antony and Cleopatra, and the lead actor, the man playing Antony, is not a fan of Lance. In fact, he’s gone so far as to talk Lance down to the board, and Lance is worried that some board members have been listening. So Lance is going all out on the party. And it works. The party is a beautiful success, with Jules and Torte’s dessert table getting lots of compliments throughout the night.
But later, after Jules has packed everything up and headed home, Lance shows up at her apartment. He has blood on his hands, literally, and he’s carrying a knife. He tells Jules that he found Lance dead, stabbed to death, and he panicked. He grabbed the knife and ran away, ending up at her apartment. Jules insists that they call the police, so she calls her friend Thomas, who is an officer. She tells him what Lance told her, so he heads to the place Lance said that Antony was killed.
But Thomas doesn’t find anything.
Jules doesn’t understand what’s happening. Lance had been under a lot of pressure, and some thought maybe he was losing control. Could it be that Lance had imagined Antony’s body? Could this be some strange prank, and Antony is hiding somewhere perfectly safe? Or did someone really kill Antony and is letting Lance take the fall?
Another One Bites the Crust is the 7th book in Ellie Alexander’s Bakeshop Mystery series. These books are lovingly written, with a lot of love for Oregon and for those in the hospitality industry. She clearly loves to bake and cook herself, and she understands how a smart baker with a kind heart can show up with a box of delicious pastry to butter someone up (literally) to get them to talk freely.
I love these mysteries from Ellie Alexander. The characters are warm and inviting, and the setting of Ashland is like a favorite vacation spot. I’m so glad that there was a murder set at the Shakespeare Festival, because there is a mention of the Bard in all the books I’ve read so far. I thought Another One Bites the Crust is another strong book in the Bakeshop Mystery series, I can’t say it’s been my favorite. But like a colorful macaron that’s not your favorite flavor, diving in to enjoy it is still delicious and worth the time.
Egalleys for Another One Bites the Crust were provided by St. Martin’s Press through NetGalley, with many thanks.
