Willa Bauer is cheesy. She loves cheese so much that she set up her own cheese shop in Sonoma Valley. Curds & Whey has only been open for a couple of weeks on the main street of tiny Yarrow Glen, but she’s determined to make it profitable. Willa grew up on a dairy farm in Oregon and sold her family’s cheeses on the weekends at the local farmer’s market. But it wasn’t until she spent time in France that she really fell in love with it and dreamed of opening her own shop. Now her shop is open, and she’s ready to share her love of cheese with anyone who will listen (and taste).

She is especially excited because she’s invited a local food critic to come to the store. She has a special tray of cheese picked out to share with him, so he can see how charming her store is and what she has to offer as a local cheesemonger, and the give her a good writeup in All Things Sonoma. But critic Guy Lippinger never shows up.

That evening, hoping to meet some of the others in town, Willa sets up a small cheesemaking class. While they’re making mozzarella, Willa gets a chance to learn more about Derrick, who runs the restaurant Apricot Grille, Birdie from the Smiling Goat goat farm Willa buys cheese from, Vivian from the Rise and Shine Bakery, and Roman from the Golden Glen Meadery. She even made up small gift baskets for each of them to take at the end of the class.

Everything is going well in the mozzarella class, each student making a shiny ball of the cheese and helping Willa feel more at home in the small town. But then they’re interrupted by a loud pounding on the door to the shop. Willa goes to see who it is, and it’s Guy Lippinger, hours late and smelling of alcohol. He looks around the shop a bit, rebuffing Willa’s attempts to get him to leave and come back during business hours. He criticizes everything he sees, clearly ready to write a scathing review, when he sees the others from her cheesemaking class.

They finally get Lippinger to leave the cheese shop, but not before he announces that one of them has a secret, and he knows what it is.

Hours later, after everyone has left and Willa has finished cleaning up the shop, she steps outside to take a stack of cardboard boxes to the recycling bin. She sees Guy’s car nearby, with him in the front seat. She walks over, planning on suggesting he not drive, that he call a car service instead. But when she opens the car door to talk to him, he falls out. With a knife in his neck. WIlla’s screams cause neighbors to call the police, and after she’s calmed down, she meets with the detective on the case. He asks her a lot of questions about herself and about the store, finally revealing that the murder weapon was one of the cheese knives she’d added to her gift baskets.

Willa is stunned. She certainly hadn’t killed the man. But there were only a few others in her shop who could have grabbed one of those cheese knives. Willa decides that she needs to figure out who killed Guy Lippinger before her reputation in town and her shop can’t recover. But will her investigation put her in the sights of the killer?

Cheddar Off Dead is the first in a new series about cheesemonger Willa Bauer and her shop in California. Author Korina Moss has created a small town and a small shop that is charming and entertaining, despite a small problem with murder. Willa is a lively character, and the cheese shop angle brings a lot of interest in between interrogations.

Be warned about this one though. It will make you really hungry. Before you start, you’ll want to visit your own cheese shop and set up a tray of deliciousness to snack on. Then keep a pen and paper handy (or your phone) to make notes on all the new cheese you want to sample, based on Willa’s descriptions. But once you get settled with your cheese board and beverage of choice, you will find yourself deep in a fun mystery with great characters and lots of spirit. I really loved Cheddar Off Dead, and I can’t wait to see what happens in the next book in the series.

Egalleys for Cheddar Off Dead were provided by St. Martin’s Press through NetGalley, with many thanks.